For the second year in a row I ran the Mile High Mile, an event put on by the Boulder Road Runners that bills itself as “Under the Lights.” They choose a local track with light poles, start the event at 6:00 p.m., and have twelve-fourteen one-mile races where the runners are placed based on age and/or speed. By the time the last events occur, it’s dark and the lights are necessary. However, this year the stadium lights never came on which led to an interesting workaround.
When we arrived around 6:00, the lights were off and this struck me as odd. When we go to a Rockies night game, the lights are on at the beginning even though the sun is usually still out. I assume it allows for the players’ eyes to gradually adjust as the darkness deepens, instead of flipping the switch as the sun sets. While that wouldn’t be as much of a concern with runners, I just assumed the race organizers would turn them on early.
As the races progressed and the sun sank lower, the stadium light fixtures stayed dark. This was okay until it reached the third to last race, at which point it was fully night and challenging to see. It’s true that a track is a smooth surface with white lines and it has the same curves and straightaway on every lap. It’s also true that running in the dark, especially at faster speeds, can be disorienting, even when you know the surface is flat.
At some point, it must have been clear that the lights were not going to come on and the race organizer began asking people to drive their cars up to the track and park them facing inwards so their headlights would illuminate the race. He also said, and I assumed he was joking, that it would be helpful if people came down to the track and used their cell phone flashlights to add more light. Joke or not, a significant portion of the fans assembled on the track and did just that.
The result was an erie, sci-fi look of a couple of dozen sets of bright lights around the perimeter along with hundreds of tiny cell phone light bulbs on the track itself. From the stands, during the races you could see the runners coming in and out of the pockets of light as they ran between the headlights and the people on the edge of the track. It wasn’t as rapid or stark as a strobe effect, but it was close.
For better or worse, I didn’t get to run during this phase of unorthodox artificial illumination. It would have been fun to give it a try. Still, it goes down as an unusual race factor and something I hadn’t seen.
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