So he was understandably surprised when Felton's Chris Zieman, 32, was announced as the first-place winner of the four-mile race from Saratoga to Los Gatos.

The discrepancy is the result of chip timing, a relatively new method of clocking runners' times. Each participant wears a computer chip that starts a timer when it crosses the starting line and stops the timer when it reaches the finish.

Though it technically provides the most accurate start-to-finish time reading, chip timing can cause some confusion. In the case of this year's race, Zieman and Pierpoint started the race together about 10 feet behind the starting line, but Pierpoint crossed the starting line just ahead of Zieman. Zieman caught up—not enough to finish first, but just enough to clock in at 0.8 seconds faster than his competitor.

Pierpoint says he is not angry about the placement, but wants the Los Gatos Rotary Club, which organizes the annual race, to realize that it could lose participants in the future if there is another questionable placement situation.

"It really doesn't bother me that bad," he says. "It was a fun race. I had a good time. I just want to open their eyes ... If this happened to another person, they may not come back."

Buzz Ayola, president of Buzzword Productions, says he has used the chip timing method at various races for about six years, and at the Great Race for the last two. He says this was the first time there has ever been such a close finish that chip timing determined a different first-place winner than the first person to cross the finish line.

"It's up to the race directorship whether they're going to go with the chip time or not," Ayola says. "Sometimes, it's a fine line you're going to walk, because it's hard to say, 'Hey, you're second place when you crossed the finish line first.' "

Ayola says the other common timing method his company offers is bar code timing. With this method, runners' number tags each bear a unique bar code. Timers at the finish line enter a keystroke on a specialized computer for every runner that crosses. The runners are then funneled into a chute and their bar codes are scanned, assigning their identities to the finish times determined by the keystrokes. This method is cheaper, provides more accurate placement data, and requires less setup work, but many race organizers still prefer chip time because there is less work at the end, and results are calculated very quickly.

In championship races that use chips, gun time—the exact time from the start of the race to the crossing of the finish line—is still used for the first 25 runners. Ayola says there are no such hard-and-fast rules for events such as the Rotary's race. He says that, although his company will stick to that policy, the Great Race administration may want to consider using gun time for the first handful of runners to avoid the potential discrepancies that come along with the chip method.

"It gives everybody too much grief," he says. "It leaves a bad feeling in your stomach."

Though he says he deferred to Ayola's policy for this year's results, Great Race co-chairman Dick Ryan says he is considering changing the timing policy for future races. He says that people participate in the fundraising run for a variety of reasons, one of which is the chance to be the first across the finish line.

"In road racing, the world-class runners are familiar with the jostling that takes place at the start," he says. "I think ... maybe the first 10 places should not be quite as dependent on chip timing."

Luckily, neither of the first two finishers were too upset about the results. Pierpoint says he enjoys running the race, and appreciates the work done by the Rotary to ensure that it appeals to all types of runners. And Zieman says he was just as surprised as Pierpoint when the race results were announced.

"As far as I was concerned, you're racing for the finish line, not for the time," Zieman says. "There's no question that Kevin won the thing."