Discussion: Worlds longest middle distance

One week ago we had our regional middle distance championship. Course length for M19 was 7,2 km and 300 m climb. Winning time was 51:10 so this was far away from what you can call a middle distance. I´m just interested to know if anybody has run a longer middle (or short) distance before?

The South Australian Middle Distance Championships this year were 9.0km (won by Simon Uppill in about 48), but that was because of a map scale mix-up between 1:10000 and 1:15000 (it was supposed to be 6km).

I saw a map scale mixup like this happen once. I get how that can happen on the mapping side of things. I don't get how the person(s) lugging all the controls out there for the event wouldn't notice something odd.

I've known it to happen numerous times. And I find it bewildering every time.

I think that because carrying control flags and stands slows you down considerably it's a whole new game. You are moving so much slower than usual that maybe you don't notice the scale so much.
I know that I often make more mistakes when I walk than when I run. That's my theory on that anyway!

But for a championship, shouldn't at least one person (course setter?) run the course to check that it is ok?

When the course setter is W55 and the M21 course is going to be +12km in seriously physical terrain...

I don't know what program was used to draw the Australian courses ... but It's always amazed me how easy it is to screw up map scales in Ocad. Map in one scale, courses in another, import as background map and voila, courses are off by 50%. I've seen it a few times, almost done it myself as well. The first thing I always do now is to set an extremely simple course (e.g., a straight line between two road junctions) that can be verified on Google Earth.

That´s exactly what I do as well. It is a simple double check that makes grotesque errors in scale almost impossible.

The title reminds me a little about one of the episodes on "my name is earl", when they came with worlds smallest giant, and worlds tallest dwarf. "He was almost as tall as you, Earl!"

it always depends on who is running the course.
maybe the time of the competition in Germany would be under 40min if Thierry, Daniel or Olav would have ran it. But yes, it should not be like that. A course setter should be able to make a course which suits the athletes which are entered in for the competition, and the level of the competition

Interesting... I see from the course setters notes for the upcoming Hickory Run Rocks event this weekend that the middle white course is advertised to be longer than the long white course...

I second bmay's suggestion for how to double check the scale. We had a scale mixup a few years ago (fortunately on a relatively unimportant local meet), where we thought we set a 2.5 km sprint, but people's times seemed way longer than they should have been. Turns out is was 3.75 km instead of the intended 2.5 km. From that point on, I always have done bmay's verification of the scale.

At the very least, if there's a graphic scale on the map, draw a purple line over it in course-setting mode and click "measure". That will catch the majority of problems.

Printing the map with at least a single leg on it is always a good practice to double check things such as the control circle size as well as the above mentioned reasons.