Hey! wrote:
I would say that most of my 10+ friends who ran were about 5 minutes slower then what there goals would have been at Boston in ideal weather. But most of them had good races overall, obviously there is much more potential to completely bonk in weather like Monday...
Finally, someone who actually gets it^.
You can't just look at the performances by time and derive conclusions about the intrinsic disadvantage caused by the conditions.
For example, let's say we could somehow know that the conditions would slow you down by exactly five minutes. If you start the race running at PR pace, will you then end up at exactly PR + 5:00? NO. Of course. You will more likely blow up and certainly positive split. Because you started a marathon significantly faster than your ability.
Take 2:10 Canadian Reid Coolsaet. By all accounts he went into the race fit, probably no slower than 2:12 shape and certainly faster than 2:15 ability. He split 1:07, which would seem like a conservative pace for him, but was obviously more than he could handle into the wind, because he closed in 1:18 or so for a 2:25. (Awesome 9th-place finish, by the way.)
Does that mean that "conditions ran 15 minutes slow"? No, of course not! Even if conditions were running say 8 or even just 5 minutes slow, one could blow up and run 10-15+ minutes off of race-day ability, if one underestimated the effect of the wind and the adjusted effort of hitting a given pace.
Personally, on a good day I could run 1:30/1:30. I didn't adjust enough for conditions, and in Boston I ran 1:31/1:39 for a 3:10. The weather ITSELF may have only cost a few minutes, but underestimating it and running poor splits cost me at least as much. Probably 1:33/1:33 would have been doable!