twenty two

You know how long a half marathon is right?

A full marathon, it’s weird distance a hodgepodge of historical glitches, is officially measured to be 42.195 km. We call it 42.2 klicks.

A half marathon is half of that, obviously. An officially measured half marathon is 21.1 km, a distance which I’ve personally run more times than I can remember and for which I’ve only rarely been off by more than a hundred or so meters (at least as measured on my GPS watch when I crossed the finish line.)

People are mad, rightly so, at what went down at the Edmonton Marathon recently. 

Not only is the course an official Boston Qualifier, but it was hosting the Canadian Half Marathon Championships as part of the main event. There were people with serious eyes on their times for both the half and full marathons.

I ran the half and I started my watch as I crossed the mat.

I clicked stop when I crossed back over the finish line a couple hours later.

My distance read 22.05 km.  That’s nearly 950 meters long, or basically, an extra kilometre. Everyone I know who ran the half, everyone who’s Strava record I can see, went about twenty two klicks on Sunday. I was not an anomaly.

Then there was the marathon course which as it is set up is two half marathon courses back-to-back, the marathoners starting before us then looping back and passing the start line half way through and running the half route we were already on as their back side.  Marathoners I know got as high as 44 kilometres on their watches.  (None of them are getting BQs in this race, I imagine.)

I know the problem. There was road construction at about 5 klicks into the race and they detoured us off deep into the nearby neighbourhood to sidestep it… but the halfway turnaround spot was at almost the same location it was the years before. They didn’t adjust it or shave off enough distance to account for the detour. You can’t send people 250m into the neighbourhood then 250m back to the original route, and then have them do that again on the way home, at least not without adding a lot to the total distance. Geometry is not forgiving that way.

The image above compares the relevant part of the 2024 route(left) I recorded to the 2026 route (right). The little upside down U at the top was the detour. The turnaround was near the bottom of the map. Note: I tracked that race as 400m too long then, so the adjustment to the turnaround probably only accounts for that 400m.

Two years ago I paced and the same-ish course was about 400 meters off, and I recall that I needed to adjust my pacing on the fly at the half way turnaround point on the out-and-back route. Incorrect measuring is not a new thing for our local race.

Me? I didn’t have any competitive skin in the game, by which I mean I wasn’t trying for a qualification or the podium, not by any stretch of the imagination. I was just trying to finish. But I had long realized we were running long and I mentally marked the time when my watch told me I’d run a half marathon (to compare it to when I crossed the finish line and stopped my timer) and guess what: there was a seven minute discrepancy.

Everyone noticed.

Folks are talking.

Something is wrong.

And again. People are mad about it. Rightly so.