Feaster Flub (Read 322 times)

I understand what a challenge it is to manage an event with 10000 runners, and for the most part, DMSE and the volunteers do an excellent job. But, they've got to do something about the finish lines.  Every year, you can check the results (including today) and find 8,9, and 10 min/mile 5K runners listed as winning their age groups in the 8k because they crossed the wrong finish line.  Days later they may get most of it straightened out, but it's still annoying.  I'd pay extra if they'd put a chip reader at 3 miles (in the 8k-only part of the course).  Sure, most of the people are just out there for fun and fitness but to many, it's a real race.  Maybe I'm being too serious (or maybe DMSE is not serious enough) about it, but it just bugs the heck out of me.  There are a lot of other turkey day races to choose from, so I may stop driving up to Andover.  Too bad -- I really like the course.  

http://www.feasterfive.com/

I never ran it but heard they gave out pies at the end.

Well, they seem to have cleaned up the results pretty quickly this year... in one day I moved up 19 places overall and went from 5th to 3rd in my age group

I'm a race timer and we do an event that has a 5k and a 5 mile option, too.  I agree that there are things that can/should be done on the event management end to help alleviate or nearly eliminate the issues your race had, but it also makes our job very hard when runners switch races at the last second and don't tell us until later (if at all).

yeah, the thing with this race is that everybody starts at once; one start but two finish lines next to each other.  People aren't switching races -- they are just crossing the wrong line.  Starting the races at separate times would solve it, but I guess that would be more expensive.

Same deal with ours: common start and finish line for both, and they start at the same time.  We used to have two separate finish chutes, one for each race, but this year we trusted runners to not switch (without notification) and did one chute.  It was a bad choice on our part.  I was updating results for 10 days after.

We learned from it, hopefully DMSE will as well.