Moore: Don’t let 4 Bridges Half Marathon mistake cheat Chattanooga’s time

I ran without a watch.

I trained all summer for the 4 Bridges Half Marathon, held Oct. 18 in Chattanooga, and I decided to run by feel rather than relying on a GPS-equipped wristwatch. I learned how my legs and lungs felt on long, slow runs, at tempo and at a sprint. I got back in touch with the scenery.

But you cannot ignore watches in races these days. Mile markers are accompanied by a cacophony of beeps, and as the race began it was impossible to ignore the fact that after the second mile the beeping was no longer aligned with the markers. For the next 11 miles, every group of runners I encountered along the route had at least one watch-wearer fretting about the discrepancy.

GPS devices are not perfect. Race distances are certified by a person cycling the empty course on a bicycle with a device called a Jones counter affixed to its front wheel that tracks the course along its shortest possible route, a standard mandated by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of road racing. A GPS watch often shows that during a race a runner has covered an extra tenth of a mile or two due to dodging other runners or moving on the outside of a curve instead of the inside along the way.

But it doesn’t often work the other way around. The race is not supposed to be shorter than its advertised distance.

Unless someone makes a mistake.

That is what Scenic City Multisport, which puts on the 4 Bridges Half Marathon as part of its annual 7 Bridges Marathon Festival, acknowledged doing in an apology published on its Facebook page Tuesday to the 1,427 runners who finished the race.

“We really thought we had this,” the apology began, followed by an explanation of how a “miscommunication” between the organization, the city and Chattanooga police resulted in a half marathon course about six-tenths of a mile short.

Scenic City Multisport is, I believe, a good organization of good people. They donated $3,000 this year to the Chattanooga Heroes fund in memory of the five servicemen killed here in July. I run the 4 Bridges Half annually with Team CMB, a charity team to benefit The Christian Bryant Foundation, and Scenic City Multisport supports our mission in ways unmatched by any other race organization I have encountered. The race director responds to every email personally. I am sure it was not easy to write that apology, and it is sincerely appreciated.

When I crossed the finish line, my timing chip recorded a time of 1:49:07. Last year on the same course, I ran 1:57:53, so this was a significant personal record. But I now know that I didn’t run the same distance I ran in 2014, and the accomplishment is muted a bit.

What isn’t muted is how good I felt after that summer of training. Chattanooga has something special to offer runners with its combination of temperate climate, challenging terrain and stunning river and mountain views.

And it isn’t just Chattanoogans, or just runners, who have noticed. Major national sporting events like the 2017 Ironman 70.3 National Championship and the 2017 Open Water Swimming National Championships Festival are coming to Chattanooga. The 10-mile open-water event Swim the Suck, founded locally, now attracts professional distance swimmers. Rock climbers, too, flock to Chattanooga from around the world. Outside Magazine voted Chattanooga Best Town Ever earlier this year.

However, amateur errors like shortening a race course for a well-regarded regional event make us look like, well, amateurs. Scenic City Multisport did the right thing by owning up to its error and offering participants a 50 percent discount on next year’s event.

But they can’t change the results for the people I met along the course who traveled from around the country as part of an effort to complete a half marathon in each of the 50 states, or who hoped to use this race to qualify for another, because the time isn’t official. Racing is not cheap, and entrance fees and travel costs may prevent some from returning.

So I’m going to start running with a watch again. And I hope Chattanooga looks at its watch too. The city’s time is now.

Lela Moore, a Chattanooga native, is a comment moderator and writer for The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn.