Cary Road Race Report

Of all the road races I've particpated in since taking up running five years ago, I had never competed in an event at the 10K (6.2 mile) distance. And apparently, even after running this morning's Cary Road Race I still haven't participated in a 10K.

Although the advertised distance for the race was 10K, the buzz among just about all the runners I talked to afterwards was that the course was short, perhaps by as much as a half mile or more. That's surprising since this was, after all, the 29th annual running of this event.

I knew something was amiss while tracking my mile splits on the course. My split at mile two read 6 minutes, 47 minutes. I've never sniffed a sub 7-minute mile in my life. The best mile split I've ever run in a race was 7:15, but according to my finishing time of 45 minutes, 6 seconds this morning's, ahem, 10K, I averaged 7:15 minutes per mile for the race. No way that happened.

My friend Steve Worley, who I ran with for a bit, said his finishing time was seven minutes faster than his personal 10K best. We talked to three guys who ran with Garmin Forerunner watches and each of their GPS trackers registered different distances for the course. One read 5.7 miles, another 5.8 and the the third 6.1 miles. Still short by any measure. Another guy we spoke with said a race official told him that the course was indeed short, but didn't say by how much.

Since the course was a double loop, I'm guessing the distance error was somewhere between mile one and two, which was a turnaround point on the course. Perhaps course officials didn't mark the turnaround point far enough out. I'm pretty certain this is where the course was short because this is where my megafast mile occured. My second time through my split at this point was even faster than the first -- 5 minutes, 58 seconds. There's just no way I ran a sub 7-minute mile much less a sub-6! All my other mile splits seemed pretty accurate based on my running history, pace and ability.

Despite the apparent inaccuracies on the course, I still had a good time at the Cary Road Race, and that's the main thing. The distance error won't keep me from doing the race again next year, when hopefully the 10K really is a 10K. In the meantime, however, I still need to find me a real 10K to run.