RandomFailure

Before getting into this, I have to say upfront that the Broad Street Run is one of my favorite races. It is one of the few races where I will circle the date on the calendar far in advance to make sure we don’t schedule anything for that day.

But with the recent expansion of the BSR into the largest 10 Miler in the country, some things have gotten out of hand. I would change/suggest the following:

1. The Expo. A necessary evil to get the race number and T-shirt/goodie bag. But the current set-up needs to be changed. The current space (the VIP level of Lincoln Financial Field) is too small and the layout is dreadful for those of us who would like to get in and out as fast as possible. You have to go to one end of the concourse to get your number, and then go all the way to the opposite end of the concourse for the T-shirt. I appreciate the “need” to funnel people past all the vendors, but there needs to be more space and a quicker in/out option for those of us who don’t want to browse. I went on my lunch hour with people from my office – including travel time we were gone about 2 hours.
2. The start. Getting 30,000 people to line up for a race is a logistical nightmare at best. The start corrals help, but they are way too large. Cutting the field into 3000+ people chunks doesn’t help all that much. The corrals should be shrunk, and there should be more of them. Harder to set up, but easier for racing.
3. The finish area. I haven’t had an issue with this until this year. Far too many people in the Navy Yard and getting out of there is really difficult. The main exit (a sidewalk at the entrance gate, 1/4 mile above the finish) is a choke point and foot traffic comes to a crawl if not a stop. Going around whatever that building is next to the gate is not a problem, but it should be marked as an alternate exit.
4. The participants. People, you owe it to yourselves to look over the information included in your goodie bag. It includes useful tips like where the finish is (after crossing the line, some guy asked me, “We don’t finish at the stadiums?” No dude, they were at Mile 9.) and that you should keep moving through the refreshment tent (I had some idiots stopping right in front of me because the didn’t think they’d get their bags, even though 5 feet further into the tent, where we all had to go anyway to get out, there were no people and thousands of bags).

This is a little late, but that’s OK.

I didn’t have much of a goal in mind for Sunday’s run, and that was further dampened by the unseasonably hot weather. The hottest BSR since my first in 2000, which was a truly awful day of running for me – I wasn’t ready for the distance or the weather. (Four months later, I ran the PDR in less time.) This time, I thought I would be better prepared, solely based on experience. Whoops.

Lots of things went wrong, from the insanely crowded subway ride to the start (my foot was cramping up because I couldn’t stand up very well) to my new watch going nutty (it’s one of those Timex tap watches; I stupidly set the sensitivity too low and it misfired repeatedly, for a total of 39 laps in a 10 mile race, so I have no idea what my splits after Mile 4 were without a lot of guessing).

Thanks to the crummy winter weather, illness, and work, I didn’t have enough time to ramp up my training to where I would have liked it to have been (only one run of 10 miles), so I was a little short on the preparation. I figured I could handle a 7:00 per mile pace. Just enough to keep myself in the second start corral. Until Mile 4, I was hovering around 7:00 per mile. I took water at almost every stop (skipping one of the two right around Mile 5), even if I didn’t really need it. And then, like most of my other on-the-fly BSR plans, it all fell apart around Mile 5. I obviously wasn’t ready for a 7:00 pace. I had to stop to walk twice: once between Miles 6 and 7 and once between Miles 7 and 8. About a block each time, just long enough to catch my breath and get it together again.

You know it’s a bad day when you think about stopping. I did a few times after Mile 6, thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad too take a left turn and head home (a little over a mile east of Broad). But I didn’t think I could have lived with the DNF due to wimping out. I finished in 1:17 and change, my slowest time in years. Not that big a deal considering I was not prepared. I’ll take this as more training and move on to other running over the summer.