Vale of York members helped the University of York Athletics and Running Club with a volunteer takeover of York parkrun on 14 March. We filled a number of volunteer roles on the day including pacing.
Pacing is absolutely the key to a good parkrun time. Go out too fast and you’re doomed to underperform. Meter out your resources effectively from the start to the finish line and you’ll stand the best chance of achieving your time goal and fulfilling your running potential.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes gets a bad press, but we’ve found it extremely useful for a variety of tasks at our athletics club, Vale of York Athletic Community. Here’s a brief overview of how we’re using it to help plan our FMC (Funetics Multi Challenge) competition on 27 June at the University of York.
Scheduling an event timetable for an athletics meeting can undoubtedly be a complex task. It’s even more challenging if you’ve never done it before, as we hadn’t.
England Athletics provide a helpful club guide including an example timetable for anyone wanting to put on an FMC meet, which covers event sequencing, group sizes and timings. But our specific challenge was adapting EA’s morning timetable to an afternoon slot, with our own particular athlete numbers and group structure.
We fed the EA guidance document and our requirements into Claude, and it produced the Master Timetable for our meet you can see below. A handful of revisions later — mainly adjusting buffer times and the long jump duration whilst compensating for some inconsistencies in the original document — we had a print-ready schedule in a total of fifteen minutes.
Beginnings are easy. It’s middles that are hard.
Take your typical New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier, get fitter and run faster in 2025. Setting goals like these, with the energy and excitement of a New Year promising a new you, is a piece of cake. But how are you getting on now, one week in, as we approach the middle of the month?