Your gun/clock time is the time on the official race clock from the moment the race started (when the gun went off) to when you crossed over the finish line.

Your mat time is the time from when you personally cross the starting line to when you cross the finish. Needless to say, you can only have a mat time when the race you are running has start "mats" to record your starting time. Because adding timing systems at the start can increase costs, not all races choose to do this.

In almost all cases, only gun time is used to determine the overall winner or top placers of a race. Most agree that we want overall top positions to be determined in head to head competition.

There's a very simple reason for this - your chip wasn't recorded when you crossed the starting line. Why it wasn't recorded is more complicated. For an answer to that, read the next question...

While chip timing has dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of race timing it is not 100% foolproof. Like any technology there are times when it doesn't work perfectly. Fortunately the error rate is far less than 0.1%. But if you were one of the unlucky ones to have this happen to you, what caused it? Most of the time it is due to simple runner error, so there are things you can do to make it far less likely that your time will be missed:

• Be sure to wear your chip on the front of your torso. If you wear it on your back, or your side, or your leg, you make it more difficult for the system to read it.
• Do not wear it sideways! The tags on the back of your bib number must be oriented horisontally in order to work.
• Don't cover your bib number up with anything, especially straps or metal or containers of water. Even sweatshirts or coats, especially if they are wet, can interfere with reception.
• HOLD YOUR ARMS ABOVE YOUR CHEST WHEN STOPPING YOUR WATCH AND CROSSING THE MATS. Don't hold your arm in front of your bib number as you cross the line. Runners often do this to stop their watches without realizing that they may be blocking their chip from being read.
• Don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate your bib number. If the tag strip on the back of the number is physically damaged, it won't work.

If the problem doesn't lie with your timing chip (see the question above) there are other reasons why you might not be able to find your time:

• Did you search properly for your name, surname and bib number and under the correct distance using our search function?
• You're looking at the wrong year's results. Easy to do if you just google the race results. Google probably hasn't indexed this year's results yet.
• You're looking for the wrong time. Are the results sorted by gun time or mat time? If your gun and mat time are considerably different you may be on a different page of the results than what you think.
• The system missed your start time but got your finish time. If this happens your mat time and gun time will come out the same.
• Your name is badly mis-spelled and unrecognizable. If you hand-wrote your race application and your penmanship is terrible, the human who had to decipher it and enter it in the computer might have had to guess at the spelling.
• You wore the wrong number. Maybe you wore a family member's number. Ask your timer what number you were supposed to have.
• Your time is wrong. If the system didn't read your time when you crossed the finish line, but you went back near the line ten minutes later, it might give you a time ten minutes too slow.

Not necessarily. If the course was certified according to ASA standards and the start and finish were placed in the correct locations, then you can be sure that the distance is correct. If the course isn't certified, of course, then it may very well be the wrong length.

But, you ask, the course was certified and my GPS still says I ran two tenths of a kilometer too long. There are two main reasons for this.

First of all, to certify a course the measurer must carefully ride the "tangents," or the shortest distance between two points, weaving back and forth from one side of the road to the other to follow the straightest line possible. Unless you also run the course that way you're going to run further.

The second reason is that tall buildings and tree cover can interfere with satellite signals, throwing off the accuracy of your GPS. For a great explanation of all this, read what Boston Marathon Race Director Dave MacGillivray has to say here. If you want even more detail, download this excellent article describing the whole issue.

We are the Time Keeping company, not the race photographers, please refer to the social media page, organiser communications or contact the organising body directly.

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