Annoyance. Frustration. Ignorance. These were the mildly elevated states at the PA cross-country Championships race this past weekend.
Yesterday in San Francisco’s beautiful Golden Gate Park, runners gathered for the Pacific Association’s cross-country championship, which also doubled as the western regional race. The 10Kish race was a qualifying race for the national club championships in 3 weeks. The race was supposed to be run on the same course as last year’s PAUSATF championship race, but as the masters men began trickling in, people started to notice something interesting or disturbing for those of us hoping to run PRs.
The times were oddly slow. 5th place was already in the 35-minute zone. People grumbled that the course must be long. It seemed like any hopes for a PR on the course were dashed. Something had changed in the route. Later in the day on Strava, there was talk that a bike measured the course at 6.36 miles, and many people reported their GPS watches recording 6.30 or longer for the race (mine reported 6.27 miles alas). Others have estimated that it was 150 meters to 200m long. Which doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re running 5:30/mile then an extra 200 meters amounts to 41 seconds. Vital time to PR hungry runners.
At the end of the day, times were mostly 35 seconds to 1 minute slower than the year before for most people. Based on my not-professional-statistical look at the results, it is safe to say that a runner who was in the same shape as he was 2014 probably ran 30 seconds to 45 seconds slower in yesterday’s race.
This begs the question: Does your time matter in a cross-country race?
There are two camps in this realm. One camp says that cross-country is only about racing, hurting, and pushing one’s self, and since it is run over hill and dale, cross-country races needn’t be measured accurately or at all since pace is hard to quantify with the undulating courses. The goal, these people say, is only to race and try and beat people.
The other camp says that PRs matter because we want to be able to compare our performances from the past in order to know whether our training was good, our racing was good, and how we stack up against ourselves. Since racing, for mortals such as myself, is mostly about self-improvement, I sit more in the second camp that wants comparable PRs.
With the advent of Strava, personal progress has become an easily measurable task, for the most part. You still run into problems on Strava such as situations where two people race next to each other the whole time and yet when they upload their runs, the distances are different. Not drastically so, but when you’re racing 5Ks and 10Ks, 1/10th of a mile makes a lot of difference time wise, pace wise, and PR wise.
I would like comparable courses so I can measure my performance more accurately. Sure, race day conditions matter too, but course reliability allows us to do what we want: compete against our ghosts. We want to be better than our past selves and without consistently similar courses, even just 1/10th of a mile difference, we lose the ability to really judge ourselves against our past performances. With field sizes and competitiveness varying widely, your race place is almost meaningless, making our times are all we really have.