Would you bother running a race with a 20MPH headwind?

Just do the race. You aren't going to know how much direct headwind there will be until you finish.

I’m guessing the point of the race for you is to gauge your fitness.

You will gain nothing in conditions like that.

Skip it.

Star wrote:

I’m guessing the point of the race for you is to gauge your fitness.

You will gain nothing in conditions like that.

Skip it.

Yeah take the pessimistic loser option. I mean training for 5 months for a half marathon and the running a minute or two slower than your hoped for time? That would be a devastating blow to one's fragile ego wouldn't it?

If you're competing for prize money and everyone is running in the same conditions, then run the race.

If you are aiming for a time to measure your fitness, you will not learn what your fitness is in those conditions.

He didn't say it would be a minute or two slower, he said several minutes.

If there is an option to find another race soon, I'd take that.

Even a 10K.

Did you pay money to do the race? If so, it's foolish to not run, unless you're in habit of throwing money to the wind. If that's fine by you, by all means don't run if you won't enjoy it.

Bib transfer is an option to recover costs if available.

Your advice sucks.

economics wrote:

Did you pay money to do the race? If so, it's foolish to not run, unless you're in habit of throwing money to the wind. If that's fine by you, by all means don't run if you won't enjoy it.

Bib transfer is an option to recover costs if available.

Fair point but it wasn't exactly an enormous amount of money, I did of course pay to have something to train for, and I think the motivation provided by having a race to train for is almost enough justification for the cost.

I'm still on the fence about whether to run it. But as some have pointed out, it's not really going to be an accurate reflection of fitness. There are no prizes available and realistically I would probably end up running it alone anyway. So I'm leaning towards skipping it... but it is a shame to train 5 months for it just to get a DNS...

I wouldn’t put much stock in a weather forecast a week out.

A race is training. The only condition I refuse is cold pouring down rain. Sheer misery. Won't do it again.

If I committed to running a race I ran the race. There are often things that come up that you can consider reasons not to run and if you give in to one of them it becomes easier to give in to others. Everyone else is going to have to deal with the wind as well so you're not at any sort of competitive disadvantage. And weather forecasts are not always accurate.

30k people did in Boston 2018

Don't do it. You obviously have your self-worth tied into the numbers on the clock as you cross the finish line. Wait until the conditions are favorable enough to confirm that you are, in fact, who you fancy yerself to be. Because you are training for what the clock says, not for what you say. Better to continue the charade (pronounced sha raaade, for your sake).

British dude, only you care. The people on your social media feed only pretend to care... like you pretend to care about them. But until you figure this out, don't do it. Dealing with cognitive dissonance really interrupts the narrative. If you ever mature to the point that you trust your own evaluation of yourself, you might consider running a race under unfavorable conditions. Until then, the race fee financial hit pales in comparison to the potential for incurring damage to your fragile self image.

2/10. But I enjoy responding to trolls so what the hell...

Yes, I totally run for my 'self-image' because clearly distance running is the perfect sport if you want to look good, nothing more attractive than the body of a distance runner. Clearly caring about your time means you're only concerned about looking good.

Of course I care about my time! Who doesn't? If I didn't care about my time I wouldn't bother to train...

HRE wrote:

If I committed to running a race I ran the race. There are often things that come up that you can consider reasons not to run and if you give in to one of them it becomes easier to give in to others. Everyone else is going to have to deal with the wind as well so you're not at any sort of competitive disadvantage. And weather forecasts are not always accurate.

Thanks to everyone else who actaully responded to the thread.

Yes, you're right but this race probably wouldn't have much competition and was going to be more of a time trial really to see where fitness lies at the end of the 5 month cycle... and I'm just not sure it's worth going to all that effort to run a time that won't necessarilly actually reflect my fitness... still undecided on whether to run or not.

You'll be in the same boat with everyone else running. Quit your crying and just run it.

I'm not exactly sure why you're calling me a troll. You agreed that the absolute value of the clock is what motivates you. There are reasonable answers to your rhetorical "Who doesn't?" A lot of runners run for place rather than time. A lot of runners know that, for example, a wind-aided downhill marathon time is not the same as a rolling 26.2 into the wind. Further, the distance runners I know are not in the sport to achieve an attractive body, so that one strikes me as a straw man munching on a red-herring sandwich. I'm really not a troll. I'm just a person encouraging you to realize that you are what you know you are, not what a clock says you are.

I have one more thought here, at least for now, that I want to toss out. When I was getting into the sport in the '60s and '70s we talked a lot about being "tough." That seems to have fallen out of vogue now, I suspect because it's intangible and very hard to quantify and runners now really like to have numbers to measure and guide them.

But when you're in a race where you are seriously looking for a good time and/or place it is unlikely that everything will be ideal. Yeah EVERY now and then it will be but normally races serve you a measure of adversity that's beyond your control. I think this has a lot to do with why so many people's racing falls short of their best workouts, i.e, you have a lot more control over circumstances around your training than you do in races as a rule.

So I think there is a lot of value in racing and in doing it in less than ideal circumstances. Some of that value is that you'll develop the mental toughness that you'll need to deal with the adversity that will likely come in some measure even in better racing conditions. Truthfully, one individual race is not going to have much affect on this whole process. But I think you should recognize that overall doing a race like this has potential benefits for you in future races. Plus, think how cheesed off you'll be if the forecast is wrong and conditions are good.

You're a troll.

If you can ever mature to the point that you (can) trust your own evaluation of yourself, you might consider not posting, in the manner you did, on people's threads with a smug "hot take" analysis just to comfort yourself in your own intellectual blanket.

Until then, just keep trolling away.

Take me, for example. Whether my analysis of YOU is correct or not, I'm essentially trolling you. I accept and own that, EVEN if I'm right.

Just run it probably but reset expectations as appropriate on race day. If conditions are poor, just make it a workout/long run or if conditions are truly terrible, just don't run.

There is, at some point, no reason to run a race where you are drawing dead with respect to a goal time if the goal time is your primary reason for running the race.