Emergency Guesstimating

In the early 90's, I was helping time the LA Marathon. With a friend, we went to the start line area and noticed a bunch of celeb impersonators mixing w/the runners. It was weird but harmless...we thought. There were also a bunch of balloons around and moments before what was to be the start, a balloon popped and a lot of front runners took off thinking it was the start gun. This was bad.

It was bad for 3 reasons: we hadn't started our time machines, the rest of the field was still being held back by a human rope and they started inching forward in the ensuing confusion. The early starters were rounded up after a couple minutes of running (including Greg Meyer) but the mass of runners were now about 10 yards in front of the actual start line. There was no way to move them back.

There were no Marathon officials around to deal w/the restart so...the other timer I was with took over, got all the folks behind a line across the road, looked at me and asked if the course certification would still hold up. I eyeballed the old and new start lines and determined it'd still be long enough (with the extra .1%). I told him 'yes' and, by golly, my friend from Bay City, MI got everybody's attention and yelled GO and we started the time machines. True story.

Good one Scott.

Just got back from measuring my "emergency" course and the official figure is 4920.2m, or 3.05768 miles. So I guess I was pretty good when I told the runners the course was between 3 miles and 5 km long - almost exactly midway between.