Or, how to improve your start.

their start technique. Long-distance runners rarely even think about it. Most of us are happy if we’re facing the right way. Yet the start of a big modern race is a time of mass emotion and private tension, a time of suspense and high drama. It is the short, crowded prelude to our long-distance loneliness. Here, therefore, is the first article ever published for distance runners on how to start.

C ‘her and their coaches devote much of their training time to practicing

Go go go

The first race I ran outside my own high school was a midwinter interschools cross-country in Richmond Park, near London, in about 1954. We huddled, a hundred or so shivering 15-year-olds, around a mustached figure hunched against the drizzle in a dirty wartime raincoat. He was the organizing club’s starter. He explained the course to us by mumbling a complicated litany of directions, pointing and spiraling his arms in bewildering ways.

“Orl right, up that there ’ill, boys, left in the ’evver [heather], pass some pine trees, on to the ’orse-ride, then acrorss the big track…” and he went droning on for two or three minutes in his south-London monotone, a soggy cigarette waggling on his lip. This meaningless course description ended at last: “Turn right at the big hoak tree, and come dahn this ’ere ’ill, acrorss to the fence, and it’s the finish, see?” Then, without any pause or change in tone, he said, “Orl right boys, when I say go go go.”

We waited. We expected a gun, or a whistle, or a command, or at least a fluttered handkerchief. This was the most important race most of us had ever run. He seemed to have completed whatever he intended to do for us, yet those were obedient days for teenage boys, and we hovered uncertainly. He glowered at us, puffed at his cigarette, and waved his hands as if shooing hens. Slowly it dawned on us that in his flat, uninflected “go go go,” the punctuation had been concealed.

What he meant was, “When I say ‘Go’ [that’s when you] go [so are you ready?] go!” The command had been given. We just didn’t understand it. Some runners began to dribble away up the hill, and the rest of us followed. The race was on. My big-race career started not with a bang but with a whimper.

Bad dreams

The first really big start I ever saw, two or three years later, was even worse. Waiting to run the English national junior cross-country championship, I watched the senior men’s start. The field was huge by the standards of those days, more than 500 from all over England, and a tough lot they were. Snow was on the ground and sleet in the air, and the stripped-down runners were twitchy to get going. But the Lady Mayoress of West Bromwich had been told she could make a speech, and she did, at length. It was cold. The runners were restive. As she spoke on, at one end of the long line the lads from Blackheath and Bolton inched nervously forward. Watching them, Wolverhampton and Woodford Green at the other end edged threateningly level. The line began to curve. The runners packed in the middle pens pressed their front man forward. Up and down the line as the speech continued they eyed each other and craned forward and nudged and wriggled a yard and shuffled another. And suddenly they had gone. Five hundred passionate runners went charging away into the mist in a flurry of flying snow, while the Lady Mayoress was still rising to the conclusion of her speech, the starting pistol held dramatically aloft. She never did get to fire it.

After that they started the English National cross-country championship for many years with what they called a “maroon,” an explosive set in an oil drum or metal garbage bin that went off very loudly and unexpectedly. There was a warning signal with about five minutes to go, and then you tossed off the last old sweat top, checked your shoelaces, jostled in your club’s start pen for your right position, waited, waited, waited . . . until suddenly, like dynamite in a rock face, boom! You leapt with the shock of it, staggered the first strides, and then were away, swept along in a thundering stampede. You felt the ground actually shudder under you.

Fifty years later I still dream sometimes about those English cross-country starts. I’m late, unready, frantically searching for lost shoes or fumbling with knotted laces, while all around me the runners are tense and silent and crouched, waiting for the maroon.

Hidden gun

In France, the starter at cross-country races wanders nonchalantly around, conversing with other officials, with his gun held casually or hidden. French runners would

jump any gun they can actually see or predict. So he fires it suddenly, without

when, according to The Sporting Life magazine, the starter at a race in Bordeaux inadvertently used a pistol loaded with a ball cartridge and shot the star runner. The wound was not fatal, but the starter collapsed with remorse and both had to be carried off the course on stretchers, a true Gallic drama.

A similar fate was suffered by multimarathoner Dick Opsahl, of Huntington, New York, at the Golden Circle Marathon in Russia, where, the New York Times reported, he was shot in the ribs by the flare from the starter’s gun. Knocked to the ground by the force, he had his bleeding wounds treated at a first-aid truck and resumed (if that’s the right word) the race.

Fireworks

Flares and live rounds would not be out of place, in my experience, at one of the world’s most festively rowdy starts, the Sao Paolo New Year’s Eve race in Brazil. It starts at midnight. As the seconds tick down, ranks of armed military police with linked arms hold back the pressing, impassioned mob of the main field, a block behind the invited elites. But my year, seconds before midnight, the massed runners broke through, trampled the police to the ground, and rushed wild eyed toward us. Just in time it was midnight, the traffic signal changed to green—that’s how they did it then—and we ran for our lives. But over the ropes that were supposed to hold back the spectators came hurtling hundreds of small brown-skinned men in white singlets, grabbing a fast start by shoving in among the elites. To complete the chaos, from windows and doorways and rooftops all around, suddenly a storm of whoosing fireworks crackled and burst in sparkling cascades over our heads or fizzed down in sizzling spirals to crash among the frantic, sprinting throng of us. Penn Station at rush hour is sedate by comparison.

And so the stories go. At the Marrakech Marathon in Morocco one year, 2,000 runners jumped the gun and were somehow rounded up at the one-mile mark by officials in cars and sent back to try again. One top contender had his foot run over by an official car swerving to cut him off. What’s next, helicopter gunships dropping nets?

Fair start

All runners deserve a fair start, so these are important matters. Years of hard training can be lost in a few risky strides. I have been tripped and trampled (that was in Japan, when the row of marshals holding us back was still stolidly there when the gun fired). I have been squeezed and elbowed; I have had my socks soaked by an overhydrated competitor in the row behind. Once in the very first stride of

a championship cross-country race, a teammate’s spike neatly sliced open one of my shoes from end to end, like a zipper.

One time I may have been deprived of a world title. The 1992 world masters’ road championship in Birmingham, England, was managed by a so-called sportsmanagement company, which apparently thought it was dealing with a retirementhome fun run. They cooped us in a big exhibition hall, 2,000 of us, until the last minute, then, with no seeding or division into age groups, herded us out through a single door to squeeze into a narrow driveway about six runners wide. Many of us were scrabbling despairingly at the hall doorway a hundred meters back when the race started. I still seethe about that one. Mr. Go-Go-Go did a better job.

Crowded prelude

All that was several years ago, before wave starts, chip technology, and the emergence of expert start-management specialists. There are few mistakes now. Though nervous tension will always be part of the experience of waiting for the start, today’s big races make it exultant and inspiring, too. America showed the way, with its national genius for organizing enthusiasm. Huge cathedral archways of balloons, banners, flags, color, cameras, motorcycles whirring, genial volunteer marshals, cops in leathery armor, helicopters thunk-thunking overhead, the seething excited murmur of the crowded runners all around you, and music.

At the Cascade Run Off in the 1980s, they used to wind us up by playing the bacchanalian last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Some races use Handel’s “Royal Fireworks” music or the Chariots of Fire theme. Most often in America, in the last moments, the rising communal emotion is focused by a singing of the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

As the seconds count down, you look ahead, and there up into the sky go swooping the suspension wires of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, or your eye travels, as your legs soon will, along the tree-lined curve of Peachtree Road or through the spring blossoms of the swerving slope down from Hopkinton.

Then the gun booms, your heated inner energy bursts into the flame of motion, and you run. The crowded prelude is over. The drama has begun.

Running meets art

Probably the most spectacular start I’ve seen is at the Disney Marathon, which has gods and slave girls as well as illuminated pillars and fireworks and a personal appearance by Hercules. The best sideshow was provided by the galloping horses of Napa Valley, which used to live in a paddock adjoining the start and picked up the excitement. So they started running, too, up and down and around their field, with flickering hooves, fluttering manes, flying tails, pricked ears, galloping in a

seemingly joyful line, nose to tail, up and around. You could see why the Greeks imagined Pegasus the winged horse.

But the most original experience is the prestart arrangement at the Niagara Falls International Marathon. The staging area in Buffalo, where runners get dropped off to await the start, is inside the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. So the runners get to do their stretches on the floor between Picasso and Van Gogh, tape their toes under the gaze of a Frida Kahlo, Vaseline their nipples beside a Gauguin, and move into edgy race mode by studying the jagged swirling colors of a Jackson Pollock. I saw them do calf stretches against the gallery’s information kiosk, loll half-asleep between classical pillars, and take excited team photos against a background of serene Chinese sketches. Chamber musicians play Handel and Mozart to help the mood of relaxation.

There were incongruities, of course—corridors lined with great works of art and bare-legged people in yellow plastic raincoats waiting for the toilet, or the sign saying “Start Water Baggage Buses” propped between two 1980s abstracts. The gallery staff was watchful and understandably a little twitchy—I was instructed that I could take my journalist’s notes only in pencil. But on the whole it is a great public relations gesture by the gallery, which some years gives away lavishly illustrated art books free at the expo.

The whole concept made me wish more than ever that I could still race. That is exactly how I used to prepare for major events, by putting my thoughts to something different but equally absorbing. Many of Niagara’s runners seemed not to notice the art around them. They would have benefited from giving their mind a changed and calmer focus for a while during that fervid time of waiting.

A positive adventure

To be inside the start in one of today’s megaraces is an astonishing experience. Yet we runners have the privilege of being part of it several times a year, sometimes week after week. We should remember that the zest, the color, the excitement, the precision timing, and the efficient logistics—all those things that give equal opportunity and an uplifting experience—come from endless hours of complex planning and physical work, almost all by volunteers. The skills have come only after three decades of dedicated work and creative experiment, passed on, for instance, at the Race Management conferences organized by Phil Stewart of Road Race Management.

“As numbers grew, races were forced to devise new systems,” Stewart told me. “Bolder Boulder adopted wave starts from cross-country skiing, and New York took over more levels of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to create multiple simultaneous starts, with the different fields merging down the road. The advent of transponder chip timing truly revolutionized the start (and the finish). No more time penalty for being near the back. A number of races have embraced separate starts for women to give them more prominence and cut down on pacing by men. There will be further refinements as race directors search for ways of retaining the thrill of megaevents with each runner’s desire for the best performance to which they are entitled.”

Race directors search hard for perfection, knowing that some runners will not be happy however hard you try.

“One year a runner complained that the race had started on time. The previous year it had been a few minutes late for some reason, and this runner showed up expecting that schedule again, then wrote to protest when she missed the start,” said Rich Benyo of the Napa Valley Marathon, resignedly.

One of the world’s biggest and best starts is at the Peachtree Road Race, where the Atlanta Track Club now accepts a mind-boggling 55,000 starters each July 4. As that number expanded, the space available shrank as the green fields that flanked Peachtree Road in the early 1980s turned into shopping centers and malls. To move so many people safely up from the subway station to their start zones is a logistical challenge, and detailed emergency planning is in place if the crush should ever become too great.

“Our philosophy is to make the race a positive adventure for all the runners,” said Bill Nemeth, who works with the start coordinator, Dr. Tommy Owens, as start logistics coordinator for the Peachtree.

“We developed a wave system, with runners grouped strictly in time zones relating to their known performances. Almost 200 signs direct runners from wherever they arrive to their proper zone, indicated by their bib number. Chip technology means every runner gets an equal race, even though the last groups start after the elites have finished. Beginning about 1986, we used hard fencing. After one bad experience with a company whose workers failed to show up on the evening of July 3, we now have a great partnership with C&C Fencing and actually move hard fence for three time groups during the wave start of the race. l introduced such ideas as placing porta-potties within the staging areas to act as barriers as well as for convenience. I also now place water tables within several of the time groups, reducing congestion and improving access.”

Police cooperation is crucial, especially in closing the roads promptly at 5:30 A.M. Nemeth ensures it by personally hanging 12 large, official-looking signs that say, “This road will be closed July 4th from 5:30 to 10:30 a.m.”

“Tf the volunteers can show the police a sign, they will act accordingly,” he said.

Calibrated countdown

The Peachtree “Start Construction Schedule,” “Race Day Schedule,” and “Peachtree Start Area Map” document an hour-by-hour and eventually minute-by-minute program of tasks, from delivery of water and porta-potties; provision of security; deployment of trash boxes, chip mats, fencing, and sponsor signage; to the lastminute rituals of flag raising, national anthem, and the arrival of the invited runners from their warm-up. “You should see the video of the whole start process taken from the top of the Ritz Carlton. It is truly impressive,” Nemeth said.

The ING New York City Marathon adopted wave starts in 2008, with a ceremony for each wave, the aim of “improving the race experience for every runner,” and the operational target of getting every runner clear of the start in six minutes.

Geoffrey Buttner, start technical director of the Vancouver Marathon, confirmed the key point. “The secret is a detailed script synchronized with the clocks,” he told me.

The time before the start of a big race might seem a kind of limbo to the waiting runner, but to the people organizing the process, it’s a precisely calibrated countdown and a painstaking exercise in crowd management on a colossal scale. To understand how well things are done in our sport, compare the crowd arrangements with the last big rock concert or presidential inauguration you attended. Things have moved on a long way since Mr. Go-Go-Go. Race organizers are runners