humidifryer wrote:
I agree that the winning time is likely to be 2:44 or slower. The predicted dewpoint is 81F, temp 90F, heat index 109F. And I've always felt that the heat index formula is understated for extremely humid conditions. In my experience, that dewpoint is worth 45 seconds to 1 minute per mile when compared to ideal conditions. So, in ideal conditions if this would be a 2:18 race, it could easily be 2:44 or slower.
The only thing these women have in their favor is that most of them are absolutely tiny human beings, so their surface area to mass ratio is high, giving them superior radiative cooling to what the average runner experiences.
I don't think this would ever be run in 2:18 even in ideal conditions. You're overestimating the desire of the faster runners in the race to run fast. Maybe 4-5 runners in the field could actually run 2:18 in Berlin-type conditions but this is tactical. Even in ideal conditions I wouldn't expect a winning time faster than 2:25 (the championship record is ~2:21 from a race in Finland...).
What I'm most interested to see is how slow they start out. 7 min miles? Very few of them will have experience running in anything close to these conditions. Even if they've done sauna training after the first hour of running the rest will be new territory. The race might end up being rather exciting. Some runners with slower PRs may try to break away and hold onto a suicidal pace (maybe some survive) which tactical racers trying to run a smart race hold back.
Then again it could be a 35K jog and then a 5K sprint, which would be less exciting. We'll see.