Back Road Ramble

The first Sunday in June beckoned me back to the Back Road Ramble for the first time since 2015. [I’ll keep writing this in every post until it is no longer true.] The course would be entirely different this time, save the finish line, as you can read about in Jeff’s blog here and here. Going in, I had a feeling Jonny would be the main competition, as he excels on trails and knows these ones by heart. Now, I too enjoy a technical trail and, now that I’ve embraced (see what I did there?) wearing ankle supports in races, can throw caution to the wind. But I don’t know these trails, and in unfamiliarity lies the possibility for a major blowup, or, at the very least, of a wrong turn.

The pre-race festivities include a school bus ride to the start, during which grown-ups are made to flash back to the indignities they faced as a child. Or was that just me? Upon disembarking, I sought out Jonny and Jonathan for a brief warm-up in the woods.

The start is fairly narrow, and I lined up in the second row, in great position to hear Jeff’s unintentionally lewd race instructions. Some of the less mature competitors couldn’t help but giggle. I was one of them. After giving Jeff some space to join the field, we took off. Again, I’ll leave it to Jeff’s blog to describe the interesting start of one particular sprint enthusiast. I settled next to Jonny, and we ran roughly side-by-side (but not hand-in-hand, I assure you) for the first ¾ mile or so.

Just off the starting line. I went with the rare non-WTAC jersey option this time.

I moved ahead as we approached the pond (why this isn’t called a lake, I do not know), and Jonny kindly shouted out where to turn off the main trail. I thought for a moment of staying close to him to heed directional advice for the rest of the race but instead kept pushing and hoped for the best.

Somewhere before the third mile, things get interesting. Roots and ruts and rocks start to be more prevalent than normal flat ground. They should have named this trail Sammy R’s (sorry). I tried to keep my momentum but found it challenging to do so. I envied Jonny’s little stride and fast turnover, which I guessed are more adept at dealing with such unevenness. [See below for some math that might totally disprove this hypothesis.]

I peeked back on occasion, but the trail began getting twisty and hummocky enough, that Jonny could have been 10 seconds back and I wouldn’t have been able to see him. Somewhere around four miles, the fatigue in my legs became noticeable. I wasn’t worried yet, but I wanted to get to the road with as much distance on Jonny as possible, since I had a feeling with all of his up/down hill workouts, he’d be able to fly to the finish better than I would.

I got to the road without much drama and kept the pace just fast enough to make a comeback unlikely. I didn’t see Jonny when I looked back with a ½ mile to go, but I apparently chose the wrong place to look, since he later told me he was able to see me up ahead. Our splits also confirmed that he was closing in over than final mile-plus.

I came down the final hill, waved to the family, and crossed the line while trying not to trip over the speed bump, which would have been ironic, considering its tameness relatively to the rest of the course. Jonny was not far behind, and then Jeff and Jonathan followed. We grabbed a short road cool down with other WTACers (while Jeff apparently headed to the water trampoline – I wish I’d known!).

A short kids race followed, where Seb hung close to the big kids, and Maisie didn’t (but still loved it.) She later told me, “I tried and I tried to catch up to the other kids but I just couldn’t!” The day ended watching the kids splash around in the water while I hung out on the beach, by then way too cooled-down to find the water refreshing.

This is a great event that doesn’t garner enough notoriety. I hope the changes Jeff mentioned in his post (now referenced a record-setting third time!) help drum up some additional registrants. It’s too much fun not to.

Math Rebuttal to the Jonny Stride Superiority Theory

Fact #1: Let’s say I take 170 steps a minute during the race, and Jonny, with his tiny stride, takes 200. That means that each of my strides takes 0.353 seconds, while Jonny’s takes 0.3 seconds.

Fact #2: Sammy C’s, the most technical trail in the race, takes ~18 minutes to complete.

Scenario A: Let’s say, for every minute we’re on Sammy C’s, Jonny and I each take one poorly placed step that costs us momentum and distance. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume we "lose" that step, but everything else remains the same. That means, within each minute, I lose 0.353 seconds, and Jonny loses 0.3 seconds. Over the 18 minutes we’re on Sammy C’s, that’s 6.35 seconds lost by me, and 5.4 seconds lost by Jonny, or a difference of just under ONE SECOND. Hardly something to get worked up about.

Sensitivity: I made some big assumptions there, so what happens if we change those?

Let’s instead assume because of my lopey (not a real word) stride, I can’t recover from a bad step as quickly as originally assumed. Maybe it takes me twice as long, meaning I lose the equivalent of two steps for every poorly placed one, or 0.706 seconds per minute. Multiplying out as above, this equals 12.7 seconds lost over the entirety of the trail to Jonny’s 5.4, still a different of only SEVEN seconds. This is more significant and could cost me a neck-and-neck race, but those are rare on such long courses.

What if we also test the sensitivity on how often we stumble? Maybe Jonny is more sure-footed, thanks to his familiarity with these trails, and loses a step once every two minutes. This means he loses 0.15 seconds per minute, or 2.7 seconds over the full trail. In the original scenario, in which I lose 6+ seconds, he has an insubstantial 4 second advantage. If we move both sensitivity levers, I lose 12.7 seconds, Jonny loses 2.7, gaining a total of 10 seconds on me.

No matter how we slice this, I think it’s fair to say that my worry over Jonny’s stride’s superiority over mine as it relates to footing on a technical trail is mostly unfounded. Whether it’s more efficient is another story, but I’ll save that worry for the next race!