What Would You Do?
Say you’re a course marshal at a cross-country 5K this past Saturday and, due to some park resodding, the course is changed. It’s basically a new course to everyone. You have two assignments: make sure runners stay off the road on the way out and make sure they come all the way back to your spot and negotiate a sharp turn right at the 3-mile mark, just before the finish ahead.
Complicating the return are chalk lines for another event about 200 feet away that can confuse someone unfamiliar with the new course. Most of the runners handle the final stretch just fine, but eventually the back of the pack folks, now few and far between, are following people cooling down and cutting the course. So you move up to get their attention and show them the way.
That works until the last three women, all walkers, come through. You see them turn with the chalk lines and you run over and shout, “Here! Here! The course is over here!” Unlike the others, they ignore your shouts and another woman who’s cooling down yells out to you, “They’ve already finished.”
You know they haven’t and they are cutting the course. They also are dead last and never appeared to be doing this for time. What do you do?
Complicating the return are chalk lines for another event about 200 feet away that can confuse someone unfamiliar with the new course. Most of the runners handle the final stretch just fine, but eventually the back of the pack folks, now few and far between, are following people cooling down and cutting the course. So you move up to get their attention and show them the way.
That works until the last three women, all walkers, come through. You see them turn with the chalk lines and you run over and shout, “Here! Here! The course is over here!” Unlike the others, they ignore your shouts and another woman who’s cooling down yells out to you, “They’ve already finished.”
You know they haven’t and they are cutting the course. They also are dead last and never appeared to be doing this for time. What do you do?
