Setting the Clock: Validating NYRR Races

Tom Kelley, head of timing and competition management for NYRR, shares his decades-long experience working on the intricacies of chip timing for races for this edition of Member Connection. 

As you begin your running year, setting goals is an important step. Whatever your goals for the year, the NYRR Timing Team is here to validate your race performances—providing both accurate times and accurate courses.

Having an accurate course is critical in road racing and Ted Corbitt, co-founder and first president of New York Road Runners, led the way with course measurement and certification. His method of using a calibrated bike is still the standard for races all over the world and is how all NYRR race courses are measured. You may see the NYRR course measurement team out late in the evening, riding the tangents of an upcoming race course to certify the distance.

In the early years, Joe Kleinerman, an NYRR founding member also known as “Coach,” led the manual scoring team, which recorded runners' bib numbers as they crossed the finish line and “pasted up” a tape from the timing unit onto recording sheets so that times matched the runners' numbers. Results were mailed to finishers and included in NYRR newsletters, so you could verify your time in a month or two.

NYRR president and New York City Marathon co-founder Fred Lebow helped usher in the computer age at NYRR by enlisting a sponsor who provided our first computer system. To utilize the new computer, Alice Schneider, the first woman to work full-time at NYRR and my predecessor on the Timing and Scoring team, taught herself coding and wrote programs to score races. Runners would stand in chutes after crossing the finish line in the order they finished. Each runner’s time was recorded to match the time on a tag detached from their bib.

For the marathon and other large races, this chute system required over 100 trained volunteers with titles like Primary and Secondary Rope, Chute Captain, Tag Puller, Spindle Messenger and Bar-Code Scanner. Alice's innovative solutions enabled NYRR to accurately time over 300 finishers per minute at the marathon, paving the way for mass participation in road races.

In the 1990s, chip timing changed everything, and Alice led us through the transition. Now, with timing mats and controllers at the start and finish and RFID tags on runners' shoes and later on the back of bibs, runners no longer lost time waiting to cross the start line and multiple waves and corrals ensured room for every runner on the course. The finish line was now more open (though we initially had to collect timing chips from runners’ shoes after the finish) and split times became possible, allowing runners to see their intermediate times as part of their official results.

Now, live results and mobile apps are the norm (check out the NYRR Racing app available for download). You can track runners in real time on a map, see their splits, and get notified when they have finished. Technology is always changing, which is what keeps our work interesting, but it’s built on the legacy of those who have come before us. We celebrate them at our winter races with the NYRR Ted Corbitt 15K, NYRR Joe Kleinerman 10K, and NYRR Fred Lebow Half-Marathon.

Time goes by—
And we catch it.