Race Details

Race Date: Friday, May 1, 2009
Race Time: Race starts promptly at 4:45pm
Race Place: CMU Track

Early Registration: Friday, April 17, 2009

Race-day Registration: 4-4:30pm on the track
 

Awards

Every runner will receive a Random Distance Run T-SHIRT. Additional prizes will be awarded to the top male and female finishers, the top student-advisor pair, the random finisher (the person who finishes in the position specified by the two dice rolls), and each person who correctly predicts the two dice rolls.

Registration

To register for the race, sign and return this form to the address listed on the form, or to Gaurav Veda's mailbox in the CSD main office (Wean Hall 4212), or to his office (Wean Hall 8303). You might get a garbled printout if you use acroread in linux to print the form. Please use xpdf instead! The registration fee (cash accepted) is listed below and will be used to cover the cost of the race t-shirts:
          $10 if received by Friday, April 17, 2009
          $13 otherwise. 
Members of SCS and ECE and their friends are invited to participate.  Late registrants may receive their t-shirts after race day.  Please, please, please, register early since it allows us to have shirts ready to hand out on race day! This time, we are going to cap registrations at 90, so you might not be able to register on the race day. To guarantee a spot, register now!

How long will the race be?

Nobody knows! All we can say is that it will be somewhere between 1/2 mile and 3 miles (between 2 and 12 laps of the track). The exact number of laps will be specified by the sum of two ENORMOUS FUZZY DICE rolls – one occurring just before the start of the race, and one just before the first runner finishes the number of laps specified by the first dice roll. 

Is there any history to the race?

Why yes, the Random Distance Run was started at CMU by Adam Wierman and Rob Reeder in 2003, and even before that the Random Structures and Algorithms conference has held a “Run for a Random Distance” at its gatherings, with Paul Erdös rolling the dice at the original race. Over the years, the RDR has been written about in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Tartan and even filmed for a special on cmuTV.

That's a cool idea, but I'm not a runner...

Then come help us out!  If you are interested in helping on this years race, we will definitely need volunteers.  Email Gaurav Veda (gveda@cs) to sign up. 

RDR Winners