Last Saturday evening was the first in the 2011 British Milers Club Grand Prix series.  I was involved quite a bit with the organisation of this years meeting so thought I would share my experiences in this blog. 

For those readers who don't know who the BMC are, basically they are a club which was established in 1963 with the sole aim of providing high quality domestic competition and raising the standard of middle distance running in the UK.  The success of the BMC is evident from the popularity of their meetings and the number of personal best times ran at their meetings.

There are a number of regional BMC meetings throughout the summer, but the Grand Prix meetings are viewed as the ones to really target for a PB.  Athletes know they will go the a Grand Prix meeting and the races will be of a high standard, pacemakers will be laid on to ensure a fast pace and for those in contention for international teams their performances will be noticed at these meetings.  

Saturday's meeting was at Sport City and is organised by my coach Norman Poole.  I assisted Norman a little with the meeting last year, assembling the pacemakers for the 5000m races.  This year he asked me to take on a much greater responsibility and completely take on the organisation of the 5000m races.  This would mean sourcing pacemakers again, but also administering the entries for the 5ks, deciding paces for each race, responding to any enquiries and most difficult of all, working out who was going to run in which race and which entries I unfortunately had to reject if we were oversubscribed.

It quickly became apparent from early entries that there were way too many entries for three mens races which is what we have historically ran with, I approached Norman requesting for a fourth race and I was surprised how quickly he agreed to it.  There was no mens steeplechase this year and entries were slightly down in the 800s and 1500s which was why we were able to put on a fourth race.  Regardless of how many womens entries were submitted, we would only be able to put one on as the race incorporated the trials for the U20 European Championships.

Finding the pacemakers is not an easy task.  We ask that the pacemakers run to at least 3000m.  For an A race, this is usually 8:10-8:15 through 3000m and you'd expect that anyone in that sort of shape would want to be racing.  Fortunately, we have a budget thanks to sponsorship which allows us to financially incentivise the pacemaking and make it worth the athletes while.  Norman also asks me to find pacemakers who where possible aren't competing already in the meeting.  The reason for this is that the timetable is based on availability of pacemakers.  Some will pace multiple races and the 5000s are good 'fillers' to fill the time gap between races.

When I am looking for pacemakers, I look at the 3000m rankings and see who will be comfortable at that pace.  I know that it is unlikely someone will travel from London to Manchester just to pacemake, so I look for athletes who are geographically close or who I know might be coming to the meeting.  For the mens 5ks, I quickly found three Manchester based athletes for the B, C and D races but the mens and womens A races would be more challenging as the required pace is more severe.  Fortunately with the A races, these tend to be at the end of the meeting, so I was able to look at the 1500m A race entries for men and women and look for somebody who might be able to pace after they had raced.  Hatti Dean and Andy Vernon were probably the two best people I could have come across on the list and both of them kindly agreed to help out.  All four pacemakers did an outstanding job and I've had a lot of people come back to me since the race to say what a great job they all did and how the quality of the pacemaking contributed to such great races.

Going back to when I first ran in a BMC meeting all the way back in 2000, it used to infuriate me that I would not find out the time of my race or which race I was in until a day or two before the race.  I used to wonder why the hell it took so long!  Having been involved this year in the entire process, I can now fully understand it.

On Thursday afternoon, I had four mens races and a ladies race, each with 22 athletes.  By this stage, the guys at the BMC are getting bombarded with the usual volume of emails and phone calls asking when the timetable is coming out, who is in what race and what time their race is.  Steve Mosley from the BMC published the start lists and timetable at 6:30pm on Thursday.  24 hours later, 20 athletes had withdrawn from the 5000s and the start lists were completely imbalanced.  You will notice that some of the 5000s only had 14 starters.  The problem is worse in the 800s where at least two of the races had just four starters.  Had the timetable been published any earlier, some of the fields could have been even smaller.

When athletes enter the meeting, they are required to enter a target time.  One of the most infuriating things I see is totally unrealistic target times entered.  What the athletes probably don't realise is that putting down an unrealistic target time has a massive knock on effect not only on you but on everyone running your distance.  So for example, I had an athlete put down 14:00 on his entry.  Looking at this athlete's Power of 10 profile, he would have a good run if he broke 14:30 on the night.  If I put him in the A race, he's probably going to be out of the back door within 2 laps and it will be a completely wasted journey for him.  If I put him in the B race or even the C race, then because he has requested that pace, I then have to ask the pacemaker to run at 14:00 pace which potentially messes other athletes races up. 

So, I'm going to conclude this blog by asking athletes entering BMC meetings to consider the following.

1. If you know you are going to be unable to run, let us know as soon as possible!  If you let us know after the start lists come out, we can end up with really small fields.  On Saturday we might even have been able to run with three races in the end had we known about all of those who were withdrawing.

2. When entering the meeting, please be realistic with your target times!  As mentioned above, it can mess your race up and make for a wasted journey and it can mess up other peoples races.

3. Please be considerate to very busy BMC officials and don't bombard them with non essential phone calls and emails on the week of a meeting!  These guys are doing this voluntarily and do a superb job.  I was sat with Tim and Steve at 10:30pm on Saturday just after the meeting and they were getting the results online while they were having their (late) dinner. 

I hope you all agree that Saturdays meeting was excellent and I look forward to seeing more excellent results in the remaining four Grand Prix meetings!

Keep training hard

Cheers,
Dave