Racing event and course tapes install quickly and can be wrapped, tied or stapled to poles, trees, barrels, and posts. Banner Guard® marking tapes are available in white, yellow, orange, red, blue and green background colors. Material choices range from lightweight to super heavy duty to suit your durability requirements.
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Here are a few things you may still safely use to mark a running route:Small piles of stones.Chalk markings.Twigs in the shapes of arrows, X's, etc.Brightly colored yarn or strips of cloth.
Chalk (powdered granite) or biodegradable water-base paint that will not harm grass can also be used to help mark a cross country course. While marking the course with a sold white line start-to- finish is ideal, the areas most in need of marking are turns and intersections.
Keep it simple. Avoid using elaborate or over-explicit marks. Most of the times you'd want to either point direction with an arrow or affirm direction with a dot, square or other symbol. Do, however, make sure your marks stand out against the trail background and look clearly man-made.
a. Red or White Boundary Flags—These shall be used to mark the starting and finishing lines, to mark compulsory passages, and to define obstacles. They are placed in such a way that a competitor must leave a red flag on his right and a white flag on his left.
Barrier tape. Usually hung from tree branches at eye level, barrier tape is an excellent choice for marking trails. It is lightweight, easy to put up and can be highly visible against vegetation even from a distance.
Place marks on ground or at eye level. Most runners in a race will be looking out ahead and down for obstacles and the fastest amongst them will barely glimpse ahead or on the side for course marks. Keeping your tape at eye level and paint marks at eye or ground level makes sense.
To test how well marks hold together with time, take a sample of your marking materials out on the course and put down a few test marks, then revisit those marks a few days later and observe how their quality degrades over time.
Before marking your course, make sure local authorities, residents, the police and all relevant agencies are fully on board with what you're planning to do. If your marking requires private access permission, get landlord consent before you begin. Be consistent.
Marking should be a balancing act between providing as much information as is necessary to ensure a safe navigation and having as little of an impact on the environment as possible. If you can, try re-using and maintaining existing marks before adding new ones. Communicate.
The textbook advice is that only one mark should be visible from any one point on the trail, in order to avoid confusion. We say it's ok to have more than one visible marks (but not too many), as long as additional marks are necessary in laying out direction and can easily be distinguished from the nearest mark.
The way to figure out the night sections in your race is by figuring out two points along your course. The first point is the point where dusk will catch up with the slowest runner in your race. The second point is the point where dawn will catch up with the fastest runner in your race.