wow… just wow.

A friend ran the Lake City marathon in Warsaw, IN the other day. She was led off course and ran an extra couple miles. Naturaly, she was pretty frustrated, particularly since she was on pace to PR. When she finished, she requested they not even record her time, as it was so far off. This is the statement on the official race website today, talk about not taking responsibility:

_Race resultes should be available later this week and prize money paid out by the end of next week. The results will stand as recorded and we will not change your marathon time if you were led off the course in error. </p>

If you were running the marathon and were led off course at the 50K exit, you are correct that you were misdirected after mile 23. That was Eric the manager of the trails, not a member of our staff. I talked to him yesterday after I found out what happened he acknowledged his error (of course too late). He told the people at the aid station to have the runners turn left instead of right. As soon as our staff found out, this was corrected. I think there were 3 or 4 runners that made the wrong turn. However, at the same time, I clearly put in green chalk 50K three times + had “MAR” in large ORANGE letters pointing left and also had a yellow sign at the station saying the same thing (although the writing was not as clear as it could be). It was very apparent from our updates there was a turnoff involved and that it was ultimately your responsibility to stay on course. This turn was very clear in the course maps that you could have downloaded and reviewed before the race.</i>