LIer measures out Olympic marathon course

The best marathon runners in the world will race on a course at the Olympic Games in London that starts at The Mall, circles St. James's Park, then curves along the River Thames before turning back to finish where it started, four loops and some 90 turns later.

Who's to say this tangled skein is exactly 26.2 miles long?

The Games' official road course measurer, a 59-year-old former middle school science teacher from Port Washington named David Katz.

Katz was a competitive runner in college, though by his own account not a great one. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he ran races for fitness, sometimes suspecting the 5K courses were not actually 5 kilometers. "As a science person, and a science teacher, you question everything around you," he said recently. "I started to wonder: How accurate is this?"

Not very, it turned out. Seeing his niche, Katz started a company, Finish Line Road Race Technicians, and measured his first course in 1977, when he was 25. Since then he has timed and measured thousands of courses, including the Long Island and New York City marathons.

An official from the International Association of Athletics Federations, the world governing body for track and field, said in an email that Katz was chosen for the Olympics because of his "tremendous experience." Gene Newman, of USA Track and Field, called him "one of the best, if not the best, in the United States."

And measuring the Olympics, Katz said recently, was different from any job he'd done before. He called it "the greatest thrill of my life."

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Katz, who also is responsible for measuring the race walk course, began the bulk of his marathon work after midnight June 13, when traffic on the London roads that make up the course was at a minimum.

Katz was accompanied by two Englishmen, Michael Sandford, a retired space physicist, and Hugh Jones, a sports administrator. Motorcycle police blocked the streets while the three measurers biked the marathon route.

Yes, they were on bicycles: State-of-the-art course measuring does not mean lasers or GPS devices, but a mechanical device called a Jones counter attached to a bike axle. It is calibrated to account for variables like tire pressure, ambient temperature and the rider's weight, but as a rule of thumb, the counter clicks once every 3.5 to 3.9 inches traveled, about 24 clicks for every rotation of the wheel. That adds up to some 463,000 clicks over the length of a marathon.

Katz had bought a new Trek bike for the occasion. He carried a notebook and a length of nylon-clad steel measuring tape, which he knew to be 100.0013 meters long because he'd had it measured in a lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.

He wore, as he usually does on the job, a $19 Casio calculator wrist watch with raised buttons to perform on-the-spot arithmetic, and a fluorescent orange vest.

What he did over the next few hours was "not rocket science," as he put it, but difficult enough that for this level of competition the IAAF trusts only 77 people on the planet to do it right.

First, Katz and his companions used the tape measure to calibrate their counters, producing a preliminary clicks-per-kilometer constant. Then they rode the course, at an even pace and in staggered formation, each man making his interpretation of what Katz called "the shortest possible path that an athlete can take" and riding it.

At 3 a.m. they sliced tangents across all those graceful turns and marked way points that will be used -- by the women today, the men next Sunday -- to calculate split times.

When they finished the course, they calibrated their counters again. This constant was averaged with the first, giving each man a working click-per-kilometer constant.

Knowing the total number of clicks they were working toward, they cut some of the turns sharper, made others minutely wider.

Katz says that he has never, in 30-odd years in the business, hit the Platonic Ideal, with individual measurements in exact agreement, but that morning he came close; the men's final measurements disagreed by 1.4 meters -- about four feet, seven inches.

He admitted to taking a nerd-ish pleasure in what he called "the best measurement of my life." But there was a deeper, almost moral satisfaction to a job well done, because no records can be set on an improperly measured course. The athletes give their lives over to training for years at a time, he said. "We need to work just as hard."