Running Against Nature…

For my final race of the season, I signed up for the “Pumpkin Pie 5K” in Denver’s City Park. We got a decent sized snowstorm the Thursday before the race and the temperature stayed frigid. On Saturday, the day of the race, it was barely above twenty degrees and a significant portion of the course was covered in ice. Not good running conditions.

I came in with hopes of running under 19:00, especially since the field was crowded and I was likely to have people to work off of. Through the first half of the race, I stayed on pace for that and felt good. Past the halfway point, I picked up the speed a bit and still felt good.

And then, at 1.75 miles my pace was falling off. Strangely, I didn’t feel like I was backing off but my watch was telling me otherwise. I repeatedly tried to increase my speed and it was like pushing against a brick wall. Short of being reckless, I simply couldn’t make myself move faster.

Frustration was mounting but I managed to keep my head enough to notice that I was mostly passing other people as we got closer to the end. I finished with a 19:58, well off my goal and my times from earlier this fall.

In the aftermath of this frigid mess, I did a quick evaluation. Talking with a few runners afterwards, it turned out we all were roughly one minute below our expected times. The course was basically flat and its profile shouldn’t have led to a major slowdown over the second half. What I think happened is that many of us attempted to keep our goal pace during the first half. Doing so in cold temperatures and on slick surfaces took a lot more out of us than we realized.

This may seem obvious but when you’re keeping pace and feeling good, adrenaline can clearly mask how much gas you’re really burning. While I think I’ve developed a decent sense of when I’m overreaching on my pace and can adjust, in this case, it didn’t quite feel like that kind of a situation. It may be because I would have been able to maintain my goal pace on a dry road but my effort to do so on the ice wasn’t enough of an overreach to trigger the “Caution!” part of my brain.

I’m not sure what I would do differently in a future race with similar conditions. The ice slowed me down but I don’t know whether taking a more moderate pace at the beginning would have allowed me to pick up any time at the end. In fact, given how many people I was passing over the last mile, I think my strategy may have been fine. On a positive note, I followed my own advice from my last post and wore a neck gaiter for the warm-up and cool-down runs before and after the race. That at least kept my lungs from feeling too chilled.

The moral of story? I’m not sure if there is one. If I have a future race with similar conditions, I’ll just run hard and hope for the best.