Relief in Hopkinton with upgraded start
Hopkinton, the little town 26 miles west of Boston that gets overrun one April day every year, may get some relief Monday from the crush of 20,000-plus runners. .
In past years, the entrants in the Boston Marathon would all start running when the gun sounded at noon, leaving up to a half-mile-long concentration of humanity that sometimes took runners at the back of the pack up to a half-hour to cross the starting line. .
If a bathroom break was needed, some runners would hop the barriers onto private property, where, says race director David McGillivray, nature would take its course, often to the dismay of the property owner.
On Monday, the race will make one of its largest breaks from tradition in the last decade. Instead of the usual mass start, McGillivray said runners will be split into two groups of roughly 10,000 each starting 30 minutes apart.
''We needed to be more efficient," said McGillivray in explaining the change, ''not just for the runners but for the community, spectators, sponsors, and media."
Runners will still be assigned bib numbers by their qualifying times, and the faster runners will start in the first wave with blue numbers, followed by Wave 2 with red numbers. The first wave will get a gun at noon, the second at 12:30. This will create enough room so that the full mass of runners won't be lining up in residential streets around the start as they wait. Instead, runners in each wave will be escorted from the athletes' village at Hopkinton High School to the starting corrals from which there is no egress to the surrounding private property.
McGillivray said that with this change, the longest any runner should take to cross the starting line after the gun goes off should be about nine minutes. The added space will also provide more room for additional portable toilets, and once the runners get started, they will have more room to run and reach their desired pace much quicker.
''The problem we've had in Hopkinton is space," McGillivray said at a press conference in Boston yesterday. ''There's just not enough real estate to do business there. It's a little country town and a crowd of that size is right on residents' doorsteps. This way runners will be off more efficiently and never have to be on the residential streets."
With all runners equipped with a computer chip in their shoe, their race time is calculated electronically from the time they cross the start line to the finish line. While that system is not sanctioned by USA Track and Field, it will now be a Boston Marathon procedure, said McGillivray.
Using net time, he says, will reduce the anxiety in some runners who in the past tried to break into corrals ahead in order to cut down the time between the start gun and when they reached the start line.
The two-wave start should also spread out the flow of runners on the course, since the second wave will contain slower runners. That means less crowding at water stations and medical facilities along the route.
According to McGillivray, the changes definitely do not grow from an ''If it ain't broke why fix it?" mentality. ''It's a matter of constantly trying to improve the race," he said.
