Trail Mix recap

The trail racing season has officially kicked off with the Trail Mix 25K and 50K ultra. It was a muddier affair than last year (my only reference point, as that was my first Trail Mix.) Shortened this year due to icy conditions on the ski hill, the trail was without its toughest segment. Despite the mud, it would prove to be quite a bit faster without this part. I look to early season races as a measure of my improving fitness. I think a lot of folks do. It's very hard to use a trail race - especially one as hilly as Trail Mix - to determine fitness unless you have done the race before and conditions are similar. I have tried to calibrate the times for Trail Mix 25K this year and estimate some sort of equivalency to a full course, with modest success. Let me tell you how.

I had heard the course was about 1/3 of a mile short. I calculated ~ .8 of a mile based upon a rough mapping of the missing segment. That would yield a 'true' course time for me of ~ 5 to 6 minutes slower, but I have reason to believe that this is ambitious. I wanted to see where this race stacked up in general against previous editions. When I checked on archived results, I noticed that the depth of the race has grown considerably in the last few years, so I decided to compare strictly to last year. What I did was to compare time differentials for each runner by place from this year's race to last year's.

I calculated the difference in finish times for each place and graphed the resulting 'improvement' of this year over last year, reasoning that - in the main - the body of runners should run roughly the same times. This yielded the following observation: outside of the first dozen or so runners (who could be considered statistical outliers due simply to the difference in quality of runners that a race of this size sees at the pointy end from one year to the next), the front end of the race saw time improvements in the 7 to 8 (or 9) minute range over last year. This is considerably faster than the 5 to 6 minutes improvement I figured based upon just the shortened course. So, if I were honest, I would assume a full course time roughly 7 and 1/2 minutes slower than clock time. This is harder to swallow, frankly. Apparently, the Ski Hill is a real course discriminator!

One interesting thing that the graph shows after the first hundred or so runners: the finish time differences steadily shrink until they approach zero toward the end of the race. Now, why would that be?

Are the Trails clear yet?

Spring is here.

I say this because i've begun training for - and participating in - Spring races. Therefore it must be Spring. By definition.

After a somewhat disastrous Fall campaign on the roads, I have decided to change things up a bit and focus more on off-road running this year. Consequently, i've signed up for a Trail Circuit. It's a fledgling trail series modeled after MDRA's Grand Prix race series. The climax of the circuit (for me) will be the Moose Mountain marathon on September 6th. I'm looking forward to it. So much so, that I had already purchased my trail trainers while the snow was still clinging to trails. As you can tell, they've yet to see any action.

In the meantime, i've stuck to the roads. I can tell i'm roughly where I was last year at this time after the Ron Daws 25K. I ran essentially the same tempo for the course as last year. I can only say this after running this race two years in a row, of course, because it's such a tough course. In fact, it got me thinking about how we as runners measure our progress. PRs give a decent objective yardstick, but PRs really are only meaningful on the track (and even then, conditions can have a ranging effect on performance.)

So, what's a good objective measure? PRs on a given course? Average times over a series of races? Race standings? All of these are decent but require too much explaining. Cycling has a catchall term for an athletes record: the rider's Palmares. Palmares encompasses your entire race performances; your wins, places, standings, stage wins, speed for a given stage or time trial, overall speed for a stage race, etc. Citizen runners should adopt this. As in, 'well, I didn't PR, but it was a tough course and I added a top ten finish to my Palmares.' This allows a runner to measure success in any number of ways!

This assumes, of course, that anyone cares. Anyone besides the runner in question.

In another week, i'll have no choice but to get out on the trails - snow or no snow - as the Trail Mix 25K kicks off the series. Judging from course photos i've seen on other blogs, the ski trails are still quite packed with a thin layer of ice the consistency of concrete. Reminds me of the City of Lakes Loppet!

The Monday following, I intend to hole up at work and follow the Boston Marathon race ticker, keeping tabs on my mates running Heartbreak Hill. Hopefully, we'll see a PR or two - or three - from the three Amigos (AKA, the True Finns).

Or, maybe just add to their Palmares.