The “Distance Travelled” field in the Race Roster participant list is a calculation of the latitude and longitude coordinates of the participant’s address and the latitude and longitude coordinates of the event location set on the event details page.
As a result of this, the value shown on the participant list will always be shorter than the actual distance that the person travels. Race Roster calculates the distance in a perfectly straight line. Race Roster doesn’t take into account how curved roads are, bodies of water that will need to be traveled around, etc. The calculation is correct if you traveled in the shortest distance between the participant location and the event location.
The variance can be fairly stark, so it is important for any event organizer utilizing this setting to understand that the distance is a ballpark estimation, and it is not exact.
For reference, if your participant location was on one side of the Grand Canyon and the event location was on the other side, the distance shown would be fairly small. However, if you were to check the same route on Google Maps, it would be much further in absolute distance as it would track you needing to move around the Grand Canyon instead of through/across. This is an extreme example of where the two values would vary, but is meant to illustrate the difference conceptually between the perfect straight line distance, and the practical travel distance between two points.
If you have any questions, please contact us at director@raceroster.com
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