Marathons and Start Right

What this module covers

Mass-participation races are a crowd problem with an unusual property: you know almost exactly who is coming, when they start, and roughly how fast they will go. London set a record of 59,830 finishers in 2026. Getting that many runners through narrow streets, bridges and a finish funnel without dangerous density is a flow problem, and it is solved mostly at the start line.

This module dissects a race: waves, corrals, start-line throughput, the width profile of a course and its pinch points, and why the spread of runners’ paces is the hidden variable. It then looks hard at Marcel Altenburg’s Start Right: what has been reported, which results are well supported, and which rest on a single promotional source.

No peer-reviewed description of Start Right exists, so the third lesson builds our own reconstruction of the kind of space–time flow model it must be and hands you a wave planner. The last lesson applies the same queueing arithmetic to the queue for the Queen’s lying-in-state in September 2022, about 10 miles long at its longest, using Little’s law.

Lessons

1. 1Anatomy of a mass-participation raceNot started40 min
2. 2Start Right: what it is, what it changed, how sure we areNot started40 min
3. 3Plan the start: the wave plannerNot started90 minInteractive
4. 4The Queue: Little's law and the lying-in-stateNot started45 minInteractive