Race Report: Crazylegs Classic
Date: 4/27/2013
Time: 10:00 AM
Weather: Low 60s, calm wind
Time: 32:26
Overall: 239/11,598
Division: 47/947 (25-29)
THE COURSE
For anyone who has run Crazylegs, this is still the same course as the past five or six years. (When I first started running Crazylegs there was a right hand turn on Elm Street just before the second mile marker, then you followed the Lakeshore Path out to approximately the same turnaround point near the entrance to Picnic Point.
I like to think of this course as bi-polar. The first mile is fairly fast and mostly downhill, save for a block and a half up a steep hill. The second mile is by far the toughest on the course. As soon as you pass the first mile marker, you pass by the Memorial Union, take a quick right onto Park Street, and then a quick left onto Observatory Drive. The climb up Observatory from the Union and College Library to its highest point between Bascom Hall and Social Sciences lasts anywhere from 2-5 minutes depending on your pace. The kicker about this climb is that even though you reach the top, the quick downhill drop is over too quickly to catch your breath or lower your heart rate before you're thrown back into another climb (and another fairly steep downhill drop). After all of up and down of the first two miles, you find the complete opposite in the third and fourth miles. These are both quite flat and nondescript. The final mile brings back the elevation change. Right at the fourth mile marker, you begin the gradual climb up Old University Ave until you get to the UW Foundation building, where you have another quick drop to the corner of Breese Terrace and one last steep climb. For the last 4/10s of a mile, the course has mercy on the runners and funnels downhill to Camp Randall Stadium.
WHAT WAS GREAT ABOUT THIS RACE
The best part of Crazylegs is always the atmosphere, I'm pretty sure I've described this before, but the hoards of red, the UW Marching Band, UW athletes (I high fived Chris Borland), etc, make it a great day to be a Badger.
WHAT WASN'T SO GREAT ABOUT THIS RACE
This may sound like blasphemy coming from my mouth, but they really need to do away with the free beer at the end of the race. I'm still amazed that the University allows the Athletic Department to give away what amounts to free beer to ~20,000 people. They don't sell beer at football, basketball, or hockey games (at least to the regular Joe's outside of the suites), but they give anyone over 21 two beers for this race? To add to this, there aren't drink tickets, if you feel like waiting in the horrendous lines, you can get as many beers as you want, at least until they run out or someone cares enough to cut you off (from that station). If for some reason they are hell bent enough on keeping this around, do one or two of the following things as a favor to me. One, stop serving shitty beer. I know Miller Lite and/or Coors Light are cheaper, but that would be resolved by... Two, stop giving everyone two beers right away. Either put a drink ticket on our bib or limit people to one at a time, or both. Three, you need more stations. It's really hard to tell how many there actually are due to the chaos of people milling around on the west concourse of Camp Randall, but the number is either two or three. That part of the stadium is basically ancient and has been a part of probably double digit renovations. Half of the walk ways go somewhere completely opposite of where you would expect. Stairs go completely different places than the signs say... you get my point. People are trying to get into the stadium bowl to meet with people they know, people are trying to get out of the stadium, people are in line waiting for beer, people are trying to find a bathroom... With typical football games, people are moving in the right direction, you don't have this issue. (Side note, there may have been a beer other that Lite or Light, it appeared someone had something darker, which if I had to guess, was probably Third Shift Lager, which is just more MillerCoors swill.)
Second gripe, for the love of god, stop giving us shitty Gilden cotton t-shirts. Early registration is $30, late is $35 or $40, and day of is $45. I know you can afford to get tech shirts made up in mass for everyone. Instead you give us the option of purchasing another shirt that looks exactly the same. When I can run a 5k with 100 people in it and get a tech shirt, I'm pretty sure you can find a way to get them made in a cost effective manner. Need to cut corners somewhere to come up with the extra money you'll be spending on the tech shirts? See my long rant above about your practice of handing beer out like it is water.
OVERALL RACE THOUGHTS
This year, 32:26, last year 32:31, 2011 32:39, 2010 32:16, 2009 32:42, 2008 31:59, 2007 32:04, 2006 33:01. So, in the larger picture, this was my fourth fastest out of eight Crazylegs. In the smaller picture, this race frustrated me a lot. Some runs you just know are going to be bad, this race was just one of those days. Even before hitting the hill up Wisconsin Ave to Langdon, my legs felt heavy. From there things just never seemed to go my way. My breathing never recovered after the hills on Observatory, which led to back-to-back 6:45ish miles on the flatest part of the course (my splits were approximately 5:57, 6:38, 6:46, 6:47, 6:18). In a race of this distance, I would expect to be pushing the edge the entire time, but the pace it which I was running was below where I thought I should have been.
To sum everything up, I thought I should have ran faster...
As I've said before, one of these years I'll be injury free and will train specifically for Crazylegs...
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