June 4th marks World Day of Running. The sport has been growing in T&T with 5Ks occurring almost every weekend. However, is the sport moving in the right direction in T&T?
Evolution Timing's Race Timer Andreas Stueven gives his take.
00:00The running culture has been growing in Trinidad and Tobago, but while there are several races on the calendar, many are not certified.
00:07Race Timer from Evolution Timing, Andrea Stuven, explains that it's now become an expensive process.
00:13It's very expensive to certify a course. It used to have certifiers here in the country. That is no longer the case.
00:26They had their licenses expired. So at the moment, if you want to certify a course with World Athletics, you will have to bring in a certifier from abroad.
00:39So your closest call is either the U.S. or Canada.
00:43However, is there a demand for certified courses?
00:47In Trinidad, most of the races are running experiences for lay people.
00:54All right. What is important is that everybody gets a nice medal, that there's a nice T-shirt involved.
01:06Certified courses become important when you have prize money, when you want to attract international runners that want to qualify for other races.
01:20All right. For example, you need to run a certified marathon in the States to qualify for Boston.
01:28He believes measuring the length of a course is important, but using a GPS device is not ideal.
01:33Nowadays, everybody uses a Garmin or Strava on their phone or something.
01:41Those devices, while they are great to record your exercises and so on, they are not accurately reflecting the course that you actually run,
01:56which is a reason why they mustn't be used to actually measure a certified course.
02:04All right. In fact, actually, the certifiers don't even use GPS devices as a backup when they're certifying courses.
02:12As races increase, he is also noticing an increase in the price of races to accommodate for a lack of volunteers and more desirable race packages.
02:21From what I see, prices have gradually gone up, right?
02:28This year, we have seen already a few races that now have hit the 200 mark for registration.
02:37Obviously, that hurts.
02:39The park run culture is also growing with one more mile free runs on a Saturday.
02:43Stuvin says it's been existing for the better part of two years.
02:46There, too, will be hosting a 5K on June 19th, where they'll be hoping for more sub-15 performances.
02:53Well, you can expect a lot and a nice flat-seeming route.
02:57So, I am looking forward that several athletes will make it under 15 minutes.
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