Sunday, May 09, 2010

Newport 10K Review - Ran it on 5/8/2010

I tried posting this as a review at Active.com.  It keeps getting kicked out.  Is it something I said?


The management of this race does an outstanding job with parking, check-in, bag check, food and drink, and goodies like tech T race shirts.  They have a timely awards ceremony with plenty of raffle prizes.  For top runners, there are plenty of cash prizes to go around.  The Saturday 8:30 AM start time is rare in NJ, and leaves plenty of time to do other things during the rest of the weekend.
Jersey City is cursed with course length mishaps. See for example http://www.compuscore.com/cs2007/may/newport1.htm
http://compuscore.com/cs2006/october/LIBHM1.HTM 
This year's running was a minor revival of the Jersey City course curse.  I think it was at least 1/10th long, judging by the slow times of friends and elites, and  by Garmin readings that were in the 6.3x range.  The turns seemed unduly wide due to parked cars on the course, and I think we were sent out & back too far around some cement ornamental structures on a pier along the waterfront within the last half mile.

3 comments:

Keri said...

I ran this race too! I am so glad you posted about the course length...
My garmin said I ran 6.4 and my average pace was 10 seconds off.

Anonymous said...

My Garmin 405 measured 6.34 which gave me about a 10sec penalty in my printed pace. There are a LOT of turns in the course and I suppose you could get it down near 6.2 by cutting each one perfectly. I also wondered about the pack seemingly taking the long way around certain turns (the end of the Hyatt pier was mentioned above, and I also noticed the turn from Grove onto 1st in the first mile). Apart from that, it was a very well organized event, with staff really on top of things (in contrast to years past when check in was really inefficient and water station volunteers were standing around watching the runners go by).

Unknown said...

My Garmin also read 6.4, so it was definitely a bit too long. I had hoped to break 40:00 for the first time with this race and was on track to do it - but just finished over 40. So that was frustrating. But I did like the course, and thought the race was one of the best organized and friendliest I've run. I would easily do it again.