The Locke Park 20 race report and analysis by Paul McGough.
Before I start with my report I’d like to thank the race organisers, all the people that helped out, the marshals and
the supporters shouting encouragement. The atmosphere around the park for the race was fantastic.
The first thing to say about the Locke Park 20 is that it’s not to be under estimated as I believe a lot of people did
and that’s including myself. Let’s look at the facts – its 20 laps of a 1 mile loop in a public park with not a lot of
hills to climb. If you can get your head round doing 20 laps for a race then that’s the easy part. Now for the hard
part: the course itself. Let’s start from the beginning and work our way round it and I’ll split sections into certain
features.
(Only read this next bit if you did the race as it could get boring for you)
The start, right bend over flat bridge, long straight, right bend, 90 degrees right turn, left bend, right bend, 90
degrees right turn, 90 degrees right turn, hump bridge, 90 degrees left turn, 90 degrees right turn, hump back
bridge, 90 degrees left turn, left bend over flat bridge, 180 degree right turn, right bend, end of lap. Quite a
journey!
So what features do we have and how many per lap? Also I’ve added the amount of time I think it takes to
negotiate these prominent features.
- Bends – 6 per lap. No extra time.
- 90 degree turns – 6 per lap. 1 second each = 6 seconds in total.
- 180 degree turns – 1 per lap. 2 seconds each = 2 seconds in total.
- Hump back bridges – 2 per lap. 2 seconds each = 4 seconds in total.
For each lap I believe you are losing 12 seconds or put it another way it’s taking you 12 extra seconds to do a lap. I
talked to someone after the race and they had heard that on the parkrun you would lose 10 to 15 seconds per
mile. Therefore I believe my estimate is correct.
It doesn’t look that much but let’s have a look at the figures over a 20 lap race:
- Bends – 120 per race. No extra time.
- 90 degree turns – 120 per race. 1 second each = 120 seconds in total.
- 180 degree turns – 20 per race. 2 seconds each = 40 seconds in total.
- Hump back bridges – 40 per race. 2 seconds each = 80 seconds in total.
Total time = 240 seconds or 4 minutes.
Now let’s move onto the race itself and our planned pace. I expect a lot of you like me did the Locke Park 20 as a
test run for a spring marathon. We planned out our marathon pace and expected to cross the finish line in
hopefully fairly good shape with the thought that on the day we could continue on and complete a marathon. Did
it work out like that? No it didn’t. Why then?
I’ll explain. A lot of people were getting less distance on their GPS devices than the course actual measured. At
the time you would have thought the laps were under distance which is understandable as we rely on our GPSs
far too much these days but there’s no doubting the fact that each lap was exactly one mile long. You may
remember certain corners were taped off to make you run that extra few feet in distance and this was to make
sure that the lap measured exactly one mile and not 0.99 miles long or 1.01 miles long.
So why were our GPS devices saying we are under distance? We are going round 90 and 180 degree corners
correctly as measured out by the race distance adjudicator but our GPS devices are jumping some of them and
therefore coming up short.
So if our GPS devices are telling us that the laps are under and we have to do an extra 50 metres or 3% extra to
complete a mile then what’s that doing to our race pace? It’s simple enough, we are being told that we are
running too slow to complete a mile, we are under pace and we should speed up a little.
Did you have a tough race? I did. Fortunately I planned a slower start for the first two miles, then 8 miles at 7
minute mile pace and the second half of the race at 6.45 pace. To be honest I didn’t do it. At 8 or 9 miles my
heart rate was moving from the aerobic zone to the anaerobic zone and I was starting to feel it. Feel it though,
not struggle. This was before I was supposed to lift my pace by 15 seconds as well. This turned out to be quite a
struggle and I didn’t manage it too many times and generally hovered around 6:50 pace.
I was aiming for a planned finish time of 2:18:00 but I actually finished the race in approximately 2:14:30. 3
minutes 30 seconds faster than planned. Therefore over a 20 mile race I ran 10.5 seconds faster than I had
planned to run it. 2hr18min equates to 6:54 pace on average but my watch was indirectly telling me to run faster
than 6:44 pace to cover the incorrect GPS distance. That’s a recipe for disaster especially over a long distance
race.
Anyone wearing a GPS device would have unknowingly made that same mistake and that’s why so many people
ran too hard in the first half of the race and went ‘backwards’ in the second half struggling to hold their planned
paces.
That’s sound hard enough as it is but now throw into the mix the extra 12 seconds per lap or 4 minutes a race of
features and you are in for a very testing race. This explains why so many people crossed the line shattered and
probably not up for another 6.2 miles to complete a marathon!
So if you are sat at home scratching your heads thinking you can’t take a lot from your Locke Park 20 race then
think again, you can take a hell of a lot from that race. It’s also something to bear in mind if you sign up for it next
year.
KISS as my partner told me when I left the house – Keep It Steady Stupid.
Regards
Paul