given that this was clearly a “low key fun charity event” I’m not sure why you’re making such a fuss about the results. There were no prizes and I agree with what Gideon says, it is much more of an achievement for those who don’t do triathlons and were out in the horrible weather conditions for much longer than those who completed the course quickly.

The results are what they are, even if you don’t agree with them. I think Alan even agrees with you that the timing wasn’t well organised but there’s nothing to be done about it now.

I think it is out of order though to question other peoples times. Its almost as if you think someone cheated when all they have done is a bit of training, something you said even you did.

You put in a good time, be pleased with it and take your issues up with the organisers rather than someone who came along to help raise a bit of money for his family’s local facilities.

Haha, you can’t really compare what I did the first year to what I did in 2011. The first year was my first event for over 20 years and I hadn’t done any training – I just got talked into doing it and did it on a 25 year old bike that had been in the shed unused for 20 years and in trainers that I found at the back of the wardrobe (also unused for quite some time)!. In 2011 I had been training, had a new bike and was expecting to be at least 10-15 minutes faster than the previous year….since doing it this year, the training has started properly, I have a coach, a proper training plan and have been doing some proper races. If I did the Wotton Triahtlon today I’d probably be at least another 10 minutes faster than I was earlier in the year as well.

Al.

Hi Nick,
It wasn’t me who was given a time allowance for my shoes being moved, that was someone else called Rich Shirley. The watches at the start and finish lines weren’t synchronised so the actual time that they gave won’t bear any resemblance to what we actually did.The two watches used could easily have been a few minutes out with each other. This also means that the actual times won’t mean much from year to year either!

Basically, the time of day we started was recorded accurately to within a second on the watch at the pool but the time of day we finished was only recorded to the nearest minute on a completely different watch at the finish line… There’s no way of knowing if either of us finished at 1 second past the minute or 59 seconds past the minute, so as far as I can tell the only fair way they could do it was to round everyones finish times down to the nearest minute. Not very accurate obviously and it does of course result in some discrepancies, but I guess you could say the same even if they had recorded it to a second – In theory someone could have the same finishing times but be split by 1/10th of a second in reality, or 1/100th, it just comes down to whatever resolution the final times are recorded to… In this case a highly unusual and very rough ‘minute’.

The way it worked out though was that:
if I had finished at 59 seconds past the minute you had finished at 1 second past, then you could have beaten me by 4 seconds,
if you had finished at 2 seconds past and I had finished at 59 seconds past then you’d beat me by 3 seconds
if you had finished at 2 seconds past and I had finished at 58 seconds past then you’d beat me by 2 seconds
if you had finished at 3 seconds past and I had finished at 58 seconds past then you’d beat me by 1 seconds
if you had finished at 3 seconds past and I had finished at 57 seconds past then we would have had exactly the same time…
If you had finished at 3 seconds past and I had finished at 56 seconds past then I would have beaten you by 1 second.
etc. etc. etc.

As you can see, if I had finished at anything below 57 seconds past the minute and you had finished at anything above 3 seconds past the minute then my time would have been faster than yours. So, there are MANY more combinations that would have resulted in me placing higher than you and if you had finished at 59 seconds past the minute and I had finished at 1 second past the minute then I could in theory have beaten you by 57 seconds.

However, without having any official timings down to the second for the finish, then the ONLY fair way to do it is to round everyones time up or down to the nearest minute (just as you would round to the nearest second if they had recorded the seconds). These are the times they released officially and that put me a minute ahead. The only way to make it so that you would win would have been for them to round your time DOWN to the nearest minute and mine UP to the nearest minute, which clearly isn’t fair.

Yes, they should have recorded the times more accurately, but they didn’t and there’s nothing anyone could do about that after the fact, so the only fair thing to do was to do the same with everyones times (round them down to the nearest minute), which is what they did.

Al.

His time is different to the results time because they didn’t synchronise the watches at the start and finish lines, not because of any extra time.

You say you didn’t time yourself so how can you know your actual time. The results on the website are still accurate, except for the fact seconds weren’t recorded at the finish and the time keepers watches weren’t the same. I don’t think you did post a faster time and given that they didn’t record the seconds at the finish line the fairest thing is to go with the times they did record.

No need to remind me that I’m in the Veteran age group – My body does that before, during and after every training session!

Al.