Long Winding Road

Long Winding Road provides the chance to run a full season's Marathon Championship with the 141 men and 78 women each running 6 races during the year. You can choose from over 40 courses together with their Weather Modifiers. A Championship season of 12 races for men and 10 for women is suggested, so with each race taking about 2 1/2 hours playing time such a season would take around 60 hours to complete - well within the realms of possibility for many replay gamers if feedback from you is anything to go by.

The aim has been to try to recreate the way in which actual Marathon events develop, with small groups of runners breaking away off the front of the main pack, and others losing ground off the back.

We recommend 40 to 70 starters, although the system can cope with larger numbers if necessary, and we deal with the race in 1 kilometer stages, so it would not be sensible or enjoyable to require a dice roll for every competitor each kilometer. With a field of 70 that would entail around 3000 dice rolls!

So we only concern ourselves with identifying those runners within each Group (in game terms a Group consists of any number of runners from one upwards occupying a single 10-second space of our Endless Track) who need their Rating checked for that particular kilometer of the race to see whether they stay with their present Group, or make a forward or backward movement - that is gain or lose around 10 seconds on their Group over this kilometer.

National, European, Commonwealth, and Asian Championships can be run within the context of the main season's Championship, plus a Team Championship on a race-by-race or full season basis.