http://online.wsj.com/article/...479061991721208.html
I pasted the text below. Enjoy. -- Justin
~~~~~
A Marathon of Measurements
A Former Long Island Science Teacher's Unique Task: Calculating the Exact Course Length in London
By JOSHUA ROBINSON
David Katz is the kind of stickler who buys his Casio calculator watches"$19 apiece" five at a time. He is the kind of stickler who enjoyed teaching middle-school science for 36 years in Port Washington, N.Y.
He is the kind of stickler who was born to be a professional perfectionist.
Which is exactly why Katz made the 3,447-mile trip from Long Island to London last week. He is the Olympic marathon's official course measurer. And that course would not be precisely 26 miles and 385 yards long until he said it was.
"This is what I do," Katz, 59, said recently in New York. "This is what I eat and breathe. I measure. I'm a measurer. And this is the greatest thrill of my life. I've worked for four decades to get to this."
Katz, a master of miles, yards and meters since the late 1970s, serves on the International Association of Athletics Federations' technical committee. He was involved with the measurements for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and the 1996 Games in Atlanta. And he still acts as a course surveyor and technical advisor for the New York City marathon, where everything from mile markers, to clocks, to scoring mats needs to be placed with the utmost precision.
As far as course measurers go, "David is the cream cheese of the whole bagel," said Peter Ciaccia, New York's technical director, which more than qualified Katz to certify the course for the 2012 Olympics last week.
His partner in this venture is an Englishman named Hugh Jones, once a professional marathoner and now one of the world's pre-eminent measurers. Jones held Katz's position for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 and estimates that he has been over the London course more than 20 times in the last 10 years since the city first started assembling its bid.
So Jones served as Katz's repository of local knowledge last Tuesday as the pair biked around the course in midday traffic, marking up tangents on the corners and potentially tricky spots.
The London course, specifically designed for the Olympics, is already gaining notoriety for having more than 90 turns, which include several hairpins. The longest straightaway is less than half a mile long. All of which makes it a nightmare to measure while trying to ride a bicycle precisely 12 inches from the inside curb.
"It's the most complex course I've ever been on," Katz said.
That is nearly 40 years of experience talking. Katz fell into the measuring game shortly after he graduated from Fredonia State near Buffalo, where he set several school records on the track. At the time, he noticed that long courses were still being measured with a car's trip odometer or a clumsy surveying wheel. "And of course they were wrong," he said. "There had to be a better way."
Today, that better way requires a bicycle, a 100-meter steel tape, a notebook, a calculator, a handlebar-mounted GPS and a contraption known as a Jones Counter, which clicks off the rotations of the measurer's front bike wheel"about 18,000 to a mile. There are no lasers (used for measuring shorter track distances) and courses rarely come up the same length twice. Could the method be more precise? Certainly.
"There is no such thing as an exact measurement; there's always error," said Jones, who is not related to the American inventor of the Jones Counter. "But the magic in it is knowing what the error is and accommodating it."
Katz prepared for this measurement by attending daily physical therapy"to avoid blowing a hamstring during the 26-mile bike ride"and taking a close look at his steel tape. Because a measurer is only as good as his tape, he recently sent it to be examined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency that provides industrial-quality measurements.
The Institute responded with bad news. It had found his tape to be 13 millimeters too long (about half an inch).
"I was really upset," he said. An inaccuracy of 13 millimeters on the tape multiplied over a marathon's distance suddenly throws off a measurement by six or seven meters. So he had the Institute recalibrate his tape.
The main drawback of a steel tape is that it contracts and expands with the temperature. But Katz has a correction factor for that. The adjustment simply becomes one more wristwatch calculation to perform on his way to 26 miles, 385 yards.
Or rather, 26 miles, 385 yards"plus an extra 42 meters.
The extra 42 meters are there because international rules state that all races must be measured one-tenth of 1% long, a provision known as the Short Course Prevention Factor. The point of it is to err on the side of safety to ensure that the course cannot possibly be found to come up short in case of a record. If an independent measurer did find the course to be short, the record would be invalidated.
Even now, the correction still irks every fiber of Katz's obsessive being. To him, those pesky 42 meters might as well be a mile for the way they throw off the true and honest distance of the marathon.
"I can go out there and measure a marathon a couple of times, if I'm familiar with the course, and come within five yards between the first and second measurements," Katz said. "So why do we have to add 42 meters?"
Still, he diligently tacks it on, because he works by the book. The wee hours of last Wednesday morning were no exception.
Katz and Jones, measuring royalty, met shortly before 2 a.m. last Wednesday a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. They calibrated their counters, dealt with a minor instrument failure, and then, surrounded by a police escort, pedaled carefully around the course.
They both wore special surveyor's vests that Katz had made for the occasion. The fluorescent "nerd vests," as he calls them, came with the London Olympics logo and embroidered names, making them look like the most brightly colored bowling team in the world.
Katz using a calibrated steel measuring tape. See more photos.
For two hours, they dutifully recorded numbers in the dark, building up to one all-important figure. "I'll be lucky if I come anywhere near what Jones has done," Katz said before the measurement. "If I come within five meters, I'll be thrilled."
The final difference was 1.4 meters.
Not many people can appreciate what that means. But those who do, like Katz and Jones, know just how improbable the result was. It was the course measurer's equivalent of a perfect game.
"It's almost unheard of in the world of measuring to come up that close," Katz said last Wednesday from London. "There's no place to go from here. This is what legends are made of."
# # #