Bolder Boulder Elite Race

Holy crap, I think I'm in the matrix or something. I just watched coverage of the 2009 race and thought it was the same thing happening over again. I couldn't believe how similar this race was to last year's. I'm an idiot. Please ignore me from now on.

The streaming feed never said anything about it being a re-run of 2009. WTF? That was the stream from their website. Their website is the biggest POS ever.

They are the 2009 results. Tera Moody and Colleen DeReueck did not race this year.

The elite races are running 20 min behind schedule, The elite men just made the right onto Pearl st. just past the 1K mark, it's 11:42 am Mtn time now.

Ok, I got the stream now (I think).

http://www.cubuffs.com/mediaPortal/player.dbml?&id=392576&catid=0&KEY&DB_OEM_ID=600

Men are a pack of Ethiopians with one Kenyan hanging off the back. Women has last year's winner all alone at about 4 miles.

Ethiopians take top 3, Brent Vaughn in 4th

Vaughn and Carney ran awesome today, I bet Bosley is wishing they were team USA right now, nice bonus coming their way now for beating Team USA

shocking there aren't results available

anyone know how the US women did?

bolderbouldering wrote:

Vaughn and Carney ran awesome today, I bet Bosley is wishing they were team USA right now, nice bonus coming their way now for beating Team USA

The better of the two teams won today. They gotta learn how to pick the teams. Jorge/Janicki don't know crap. Everyone knew what the outcome was going to be before the end of the race.

Ethiopians laid the smack down today.

Lelissa and Tola held hands and crossed the line...

Women Daska and Gobena were followed by 3 kenyans. Ethiopia took the title i think gebre must have been 6th then

Tera didn't seem to be injured Saturday at a 10m race in Chicago. She ran slow for her standereds but I think she might have arrived late because I didn't see her at start but did as she ran by me at 5.

For her WHAT?????????

The hell with the elite race. This team stuff is played-out crap, the teams are selected by playing politics with agents, which hardly ever results in compelling competition. Just look at how the Ethiopian men were untouched, all alone doing a team tempo run. It's a completely irrelevant format, watching 18-24 runners go by in a road race is about as fun as watching grass grow. It's no longer a crit course, there's no logistical justification for sticking with the stupid team format that keeps the elite field so small. Just make it 50-100 runners per gender in the elite waves, even separate US prize money from overall prize money if you want to keep up the chauvinistic charity, and let them go at it on that course.

Anyway, what I really want to know are the top 5-10 male and female in the citizen's race.

assless codpiece wrote:

The hell with the elite race. This team stuff is played-out crap, the teams are selected by playing politics with agents, which hardly ever results in compelling competition. Just look at how the Ethiopian men were untouched, all alone doing a team tempo run. It's a completely irrelevant format, watching 18-24 runners go by in a road race is about as fun as watching grass grow. It's no longer a crit course, there's no logistical justification for sticking with the stupid team format that keeps the elite field so small. Just make it 50-100 runners per gender in the elite waves, even separate US prize money from overall prize money if you want to keep up the chauvinistic charity, and let them go at it on that course.

Anyway, what I really want to know are the top 5-10 male and female in the citizen's race.

Elite race is all for show. Many (or I should say, most) of the runners initially contacted for spots on the elite teams (at least in CO) this year turned down the offer due to numerous disadvantages that come with being in the elite race. For one, you race nearly mid-day and today was almost 80 degrees by then. Second, unless you're ready to go out insanely fast and hang on for dear life or "race" by yourself for 8,000 meters, not a good option. Every year the top citizens times beat a number of the "elite" times simply owing to those circumstances (unfortunate given that they do not give prize money to citizens). About the only disadvantage to racing the citizens race is that you have more people to go around in the early stages of the race (ex: the idiot high school boys trying to be heroes who think that the first 1.5k is indicative of the difficulty of the rest of the course). And that's typical of nearly all roadraces. Just tossing that in. And about the only advantage to the elite race is a)people think you're cool, and b) you could potentially win money.

I like the elite format just fine, more so now that they run the citizens course. Sure, running later in the day produces somewhat slower times ... but time is a silly thing to focus on for road races, especially for a rolling course at altitude. If super fast times is all you are interested in than BB will never make you very happy. Besides, the current elite team competition provides a fairly unique racing format. It's a little quirky and it would be nice to see more parity between the teams but what they hey, it's nice to watch thousands of casual runners lining the course and cheering elites.

That assessment is fine and all, I agree that there are few good reasons to run this race compared with all the good reasons to not run it. Running a hard effort at altitude in late May, when marathoners are just coming back from recovering from a spring marathon and track runners would rather be tuning-up at a sea level track race, is not exactly sensible. That's why this race gets so many tourist teams, like UK, Peru, Columbia, etc. They get a paid trip out of it while on the other hand there will always be an agent or two who can package a trio of poor yet fast Ethiopians and Kenyans for the elite race director.

But I'd have to believe that you could get a better field for this race (and a better show for the spectators) if you blew out the team format and just accepted the first 75 men and 75 women who have proof of performance in the past year (maybe of <29:30 and <34:30, respectively) and just held a regular race without the whole contrived team thing. Maybe even have another, faster set of standards for runners to get travel expenses covered.

assless codpiece wrote:

But I'd have to believe that you could get a better field for this race (and a better show for the spectators) if you blew out the team format and just accepted the first 75 men and 75 women who have proof of performance in the past year (maybe of <29:30 and <34:30, respectively) and just held a regular race without the whole contrived team thing. Maybe even have another, faster set of standards for runners to get travel expenses covered.

I ran the elite men's race before it was changed to a team format. Back then, the Bolder Boulder attracted Olympic champions and medalists, world record holders, and lots of terrific runners from lots of countries. Everyone was on an equal footing, with prize money for individual placings and time bonuses that increased with every second -- and, as far as I know, no appearance fees. With the team format, everything was changed to skew the incentives in favor of a few hand-picked American runners. For such a liberal and allegedly international community like Boulder, the team format was a shockingly jingoistic (and arguably racist) change for the worse.

Well now it's just a joke, clowns on the internet think that Team Colorado beating Team USA means something.

The womens cross country champion showed up at this race and some people on this forum are saying the elite race is not what it used to be.

Are we just talking about US distance runners? when we question the elite field?

Most American elites don't run road races. The US depth is so shallow that ... we cannot cover Road and Track. Talents like shalane, kara (who is not pregnant) will never race on the roads with B - Kenyans and Ethiopians because they can't really beat them either. They would rather collect there checks from Nike and "train" for the next Olympics.

yeah kara's not pregnant...she just has a beer belly.

but that's an aside.