If you’re not starting on the front row in a marathon you’re going to be significantly slowed down weaving through the people in between you and your draft runners up ahead. There’s really no way to avoid that in a sanctioned race. Putting a huge gap between the draft runners and the person going for the record with no other runners isn’t going to be allowed.
I think for official records you go by gun time, not chip time, to avoid this sort of thing. Is that true or just a poor memory on my part?
Official records and elite/professional racers’ results are based on gun times; or at least, so it is in the races I’ve run. (I’ve won my age group in a couple of races, but they were small enough that there was no appreciable gap between gun and chip times.)
In big races like the Boston Marathon or the Peachtree Road Race, elites start first and separately; other runners are segregated into start waves, based on their qualifying times.
There was an instance some years ago of a female non-elite runner who started in Wave B of a big marathon, and actually ran a faster chip time than the elite woman who won the race; IIRC, the race director ultimately declared her the “amateur” winner, but let the elite winner keep her prize purse as the “professional” winner.
A marathon runner with a username Slow Moving Vehicle is such an apt combination for this thread that I think we can give you some pretty broad leeway.
In Boston, the elite women start early, the elite men are at the front of Wave 1 Corral 1. Unless they’ve changed things recently, I used to work at the starting line.
Here are the start times for the 2019 race, I assume 2020 is very similar:
Each Wave last year was approximately 7500 runners, this year will be closer to 8000. There is a slight separation between the Elite Men and Wave One, maybe 5-10 feet IIRC.