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Monday Morning Quarterback
What changes could have improved the 1986 Pittsburgh Marathon? In retrospect the
organizers should have done then what they ultimately did anyway:
- Date and time considerations are non-negotiable. Some times and places are just not
appropriate for certain activities. Scheduling events for those times and places in the
face of significant risk of hazardous competition conditions is highly undesirable
- If truly freak and unpredictable weather conditions make a race hazardous for all
competitors, then the event should be postponed to a safer time or cancelled.
- If weather conditions make the event hazardous but not universally dangerous, the event
should be modified. There is no doubt that elite international marathoners can run
successfully in unfavorable conditions. These runners, chosen through a huge pyramid of
selective processes, possess the genetic, conditioning and strategic tools to cope with
such conditions, although asking them to do so is certainly doing them no favor. They are
in such good touch with their abilities that they will modify their pace to keep core
temperature from rising to collapse levels.
- Faced with dangerously hot conditions, the 1986 Pittsburgh Marathon organizers might
have either cancelled the event or radically changed its format. If the event were to go
forward, the full marathon race could have been restricted to runners with a certain
cut-off qualifying time, such as 3 hours. These runners are all highly skilled, and would
be at significantly lower risk of heat injury. Shortly after these runners were started,
all other runners would have started in a 10K run. (This 76% reduction in race length
would have markedly reduced heat-related injuries. The 1986 Pittsburgh Marathon had a
hospitalization rate of 17.6/1000 runners. By comparison, the 10 km 1979 Atlanta Peachtree
Road Race, held in roughly similar conditions on July 4th had a hospitalization rate of
1.6/1000 runners. This 11-fold difference in hospitalization rates is highly significant,
and surely reflects race length in addition to athlete acclimatization.) Although setting
up a second finish line and arranging for transport of runners back to the original finish
area by bus would have posed logistic challenges, and the change might have upset some
runners, it would have been preferable to the outcome of this event which was allowed to
go forward in dangerously hot conditions.
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