A lousy day for a race

Last Saturday was the WCAC championship in cross country. My team competes in this event every season - and we have won the championship for the past three years. As the event approached last week, the weather forecast continued to worsen. A storm that dumped 16 inches of snow on the Front Range in Colorado was headed our way. On the morning of the race, the temperatures hovered in the upper 30s and a cold rain had been falling all night. The course, covering a mixture of grass and dirt trails, was in awful shape. Two features of the course were particularly problematic this year. The course features a crossing of a ~20 yard wide creek, which is normally ~6 inches deep at the most. Swollen with the rain, the water was turbid, obscuring the bottom, and reached several feet in depth. In addition, a downed tree forced a detour on another section of the course, resulting in a steep descent on what soon turned into a very muddy hill.

As the day continued, conditions worsened, such that by the time the varsity team toed the line, sleet was blowing in on a stiff wind, and the temperature had dropped to below 35. At the end of the race, several of my runners huddled in warm vehicles to recover from the extreme shock their bodies had received. In addition, a runner in the freshman race injured his toe on the creek crossing, and many athletes went home with muddy, soaked clothing.

These were the worst conditions I have seen in 16 years of coaching. Several of my assistant coaches, with an additional 40+ years of experience, agreed with this assessment. I have run in below-zero temperatures with snow on the ground (MIAA championships in college) and in many other instance in the rain and mud. The New Castle County Championships had to be postponed one year after the first couple of races because the course was too dangerous. The Prep Classic in 2009 faced a similar situation. But Saturday, Oct 29th will go down in my memory as the most brutal conditions to date.