Almost 1/3 of the race is elapsed. All national teams have found the table where the intermediate results are available for team managers :-). On these lists also a prediction for the final distance after 24 hours is given. Remarkably these predictions give final distances below 230 kilometres for the leading runners. So I asked John Baks from LOC (local organisation committee) Apeldoorn, how these predictions are calculated. John uses statistic material from previous editions, and he assured me that these predictions are already accurate within 5 percent for the moment, so I best case the winner will run 240 kilometres. The best woman has a predicted final distance of almost 200 kilometres, which implies that 210 will be the best case scenario.
A personal interpretation of these numbers is, that I draw the conclusion that most runners do choose their starting pace more careful that a few years ago. We saw it already last year during the EC in Uden; the first observations for this year gives me the impression that this progress in “smart running” is continued. So I do believe we will have champions with longer distances that the predicted ones.
There is still some confusion in the Belgium team; team manager Jos Cleemput believes that Paul Beckers is the best Belgium runner, and drawing the conclusion from it that Paul is missed one time (which is not very likely with Championship registration).
An other nice thing to mention is our German friend Dietmar Mücke. Each time he gets his refreshment he kisses his wife afterwards (at least it is my interpretation it is his wife); it must motivate a runner to keep o running lots of laps.
So far my last observations from Apeldoorn. Next I hope to post some lists of lap recordings already so you can monitor how your favourite runner is doing his or her “24 hour job”.
Anton Smeets
a.smeets@trouwweb.nl