MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Sydney City to Surf 2008 results

Posted on 2008-08-13 21:00:00, modified on 2008-09-15 13:00:00
Tags: Sports

Last Sunday I walked, together with Dirk in his stroller, the yearly Sydney City to Surf fun-run. It's a fourteen kilometer track through the city and except for the "Heartbreak Hill" it's a nice track.

There were 70 thousand other people in it and all, except one guy who died of a heart attack 200 meters away of the finish, had a good time.

In previous years they took an average starting time and your exact finishing time, subtracted that and that is your time. So it was possible two years ago that Naomi and Dirk finished half an hour ahead of me: My official starting time was half an hour before theirs, but I walked with them. Needless to say that it didn't make me happy.

This year they had automated the time-tracking mechanism with RFID tags. So finally my real time, about two hours and thirty minutes, would be shown to the world! Justice at last! Except euhm... yes, computers are involved...

The run started at 09:00 with the professional people running and it wasn't until 10:00 that I finally crossed the starting line. And I finished at 12:40. Two hours fourty minutes, that's because Dirkie wanted to have an ice-cream and we had some trouble with him falling out of the stroller (only his pride got hurt).

According to the official results, I came in on place 53564 at 222 minutes and 21 seconds. That is three hours and fourty minutes. What!??!? So I compared it with numbers of other people I knew who ran: All between 70 and 90 minutes. So theirs is correct!

Looking through the results at people at place 55827, their time is 177 minutes 47. Their time is slower, and their rank is lower. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is where my 60 minutes have gone! Tomorrow I'll give them a call to sort this slander out!

Update! The City2Surf people said that it happened because the tag wasn't scanned at the beginning. Yes, I got that idea. To err is human, to fully mess things up you need computers... The new time will be 162.21. I'm on my way to the blue starting group again!

Update! (2008-09-02) Got the certificate, it says.... 222:21 minutes! Oh man, let's go back to the 30 minute disqualitifaction because I started at the end of the yellow group..

Update! (2008-09-15) Got another the certificate, it says.... 162:21 minutes! That was an expensive mistake. Blue group, here I come!

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Comments:
From: Tina
URL:
Posted on: 2008-09-10 12:49:59
CommentHey,
Yeah they stuffed up everyones certificate too. They put the start time on your certificate instead of your tag time after spending thousands of dollars developing it, haha! So us in the yellow group who started at 10am got an extra 60mins added to their time. City to Surf have since issued an email stating that new certificates will be sent with the chip/tag time and not to call the helpline cause its overloaded hah!
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