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Don Lein, the Chairperson of the USATF Masters Long Distance Running (LDR) Committee has asked me to share the following information with all Niagara Association Race Directors, Master runners and Officials: “I am Chairperson of Masters Long Distance Running for USATF. I also am the Masters Awards Chairperson, and I do the National Masters rankings for Running Times magazine. USATF Masters awards are for American citizens only while the Running Times rankings are for anyone running in races in the U. S. Needless to say the races must be run on USATF certified courses, timing rules need to be followed and useable results need to be submitted to USATF or any of a number of national/regional results databases. Any Master runner who wishes can send results directly to me. There are many places in the U. S. including the Niagara Association where result submission is, at best, erratic. One of the items I need included in the results in order to calculate age-graded %, which is part of the ranking process, is each Masters runners specific single-year age on the day of the race, otherwise I have to ignore the results. Too often in the Niagara Association, results have been formatted in 5 or 10 year age groups and thus are useless for rankings and awards. I have discussed this with Bill Quinlisk who is on our Masters LDR Executive Committee and that is why I suggest that runners who wished to be considered for ranking and award purposes send their results directly to me. The other runners, unless I know their specific age from other results I have recorded, simply do not appear on my rankings list. Frankly, since I review 10,000 races per year, as a volunteer, I just do not have the time to review lists of results in the hope I will find a name I remember from an area. I think every runner deserves the recognition she/he has earned and my wife and I work very long and hard to make that happen, but I am completely reliant on the race directors/timing companies sending me results in a format that I can use in this process. I thank those who already format the results using single-year ages for Master runners. I and USATF appreciate them. However, we have had a recurring problems with specific ages on results and it bothers me that there may be deserving runners whose times I can't include because I don't know their specific age. Thanks for your attention to this matter and let me know if there is anything I can do to help. I can be reached at: dmlein@earthlink.net
Regards,
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