How to Measure Race Day Performance - Coach Tip Tuesday

There isn’t a race that I love more than the Mountain Goat Run.

The Upstate Orthopedics Mountain Goat Run is a 10-mile road running race in Syracuse, New York that takes place on the first Sunday in May every year.  It features 565 feet of elevation gain over those ten miles and the course winds its way through the neighborhoods of southwest and southeast Syracuse, allowing runners to experience these areas of the city in a way that isn’t possible on a normal day.  Over the years, the Mountain Goat Run has become Syracuse’s premiere road running race, and it’s become a beloved annual rite of spring in the city.

Runners are drawn to the Mountain Goat Run because of the challenge it poses.  I was one of these runners; fifteen years ago, that’s what drew me to running this race for the first time.  I hadn’t ever run ten miles before, and I certainly hadn’t ever run a hilly race like this.  To this day, finishing the Mountain Goat Run in 2010 remains one of the most significant accomplishments of my athletic life.  The race was hard…very hard.  I remember wondering if I could even do it, both before and during the race.  When I crossed the finish line, I realized I was stronger and more capable athletically than I had ever realized.  The Mountain Goat Run lit a spark in me; it inspired me to become an endurance athlete, and ultimately, to become an endurance sports coach.  I am not exaggerating when I say that the Mountain Goat Run literally changed the course of my life.  (Pun intended.)

The 2024 Mountain Goat Run

This past Sunday, I ran the Mountain Goat Run for the 14th time.  I haven’t ever run any race this many times (not even close).  In fact, I’m pretty staunch about not doing races more than once.  I feel that there are too many interesting races and potential adventures waiting out there for me to get stuck on doing the same races year after year.  In pretty much every other case, that means that once I do a race, it’s off the table and I won’t do it again.  But I make an exception for the Mountain Goat Run, which shows just how much I do love this race.

Unlike that first year at the Mountain Goat (when I was ignorant about what I was doing and essentially fumbling my way to the finish line), this year I headed into race day with a very specific race strategy.  I thoughtfully considered my activities and my preparation prior to race day.  For instance, I carb loaded for the two days prior to the race, a process that I am convinced works and has enhanced both my race day performance in and recovery from long-course races.  Based on the weather forecast (which was calling for rain for most of the race), I made sure I had two pairs of shoes ready to go (one regular pair of road running shoes and one waterproof pair of road running shoes).  I packed up my Nathan Pinnacle Hydration Vest with the fueling and hydration I’d need for the race, and I stuck to the fueling and hydration strategy that I’ve tested robustly in training and that I know works well for me.

I ran on effort, and didn’t look at any metrics throughout the race at all other than checking the total duration so I could stick to my fueling strategy.  Throughout the race, I was constantly scanning my body and assessing how I was feeling.  At the file-mile mark, I noted that I was feeling better than I expected for this point in the race.  After I climbed the Colvin Hill and was approaching the 7-mile mark, I noted that I was still feeling really good, so I decided to increase my effort a little bit more than what I had been running.  After I crested the final hill of the race in Thornden Park, I headed back down into the city and as I approached the 9-mile mark, I realized that I was still feeling very good and very strong.  I increased my effort again, passed athletes during that final mile (and didn’t get passed by anyone), and I crossed the finish line with a negative split for the race.  (I’ll note that achieving a negative split is hard to do in this race since the second half of the course is more difficult than the first half; in my 14 times racing the Mountain Goat Run, I’ve only negative split the race three times including Sunday.)

Maybe I sound like I’m bragging and like I am completely arrogant by now.  But I had a phenomenal race on Sunday.  I was thrilled when I crossed the finish line and after the race.  The joy I felt about this has lasted well beyond Sunday; I’m still feeling it now.  I executed my race strategy perfectly and I felt fantastic. 

But what if I tell you that this year’s Mountain Goat Run was my slowest ever…by a margin of more than 4%?  

Yes, that’s right.  I’ve run the Mountain Goat Run 14 times, and this past Sunday was my slowest time ever.  In fact, even when I consider the other 10-mile races I’ve run besides the Mountain Goat Run, Sunday’s race was the slowest 10-mile race I’ve ever run. 

Is that what you expected to hear after the experience I described?  (If you say yes, I’m calling you out as a liar here and now.)

What is a Good Time?

Athletes are always so preoccupied with their paces and their times, in training and then especially on race day.  I get it; timing is how we are measured and ranked in races against others in the race.  How fast or slow you are determines your finishing place and where you stack up relative to other people.  Even for those of us who aren’t in contention to win a race, our finish times matter, since it is often how we are measuring ourselves against ourselves.

The trap about numbers is that we think that they are the measure of our worth, and by extension, a measure of whether we performed well or not in a given workout or race.  Phrases like “Beat Yesterday”, “1% Better”, and “110%” have become so commonplace that what they represent - that we should always be seeking a numerical representation of “better” and “progress”.  Faster speeds, lower finishing times, higher weights.  More, more, more, more…in a numerical, quantifiable expression.  These are the things that matter, right?  These are the things that we should always be chasing in endurance sports, right?

Maybe that works for some people.  But what I’ve learned from racing literally hundreds of times myself and after coaching hundreds of athletes to thousands of finish lines is this:

You can chase numbers, and they can bring you feelings of excitement.  But the high that comes from hitting an arbitrary time metric fades, and it honestly fades rather quickly.  The longest-lasting and most fulfilling experiences in endurance sports are not the result of achieving a specific time.  The best experiences I’ve had in endurance sports have been the result of a long journey, and the sense of fulfillment I’ve had has come from the journey and experience itself, what I learned about myself along the way, and how I managed my plan and conducted myself on race day.  My best experiences in endurance sports have been experiences of “more”...just not more numbers.  More knowledge.  More experience.  More gratitude.  More joy.  Some of the most meaningful measures of things in sports and in life are challenging - if now completely impossible - to measure tangibly.  My race day performance and experience on Sunday was one of those meaningful experiences that is not able to be measured tangibly.

The Base of the Iceberg

My experience at this year’s Mountain Goat Run (and my experience at the 2021 Mountain Goat Run) are excellent illustrations of this truth: You never, ever actually know what is going on with another human being.  You can look at their finish times, read the things they post on social media, listen to what they choose to tell you, see them running or walking on a race course, and make assumptions about how they are doing, why they’re doing it, and how they did.  We’ve all done it at one time or another.  But it’s so important to bear in mind that anything we’re seeing about another person is just the tip of their personal iceberg.

On Friday, February 7, 2025, I was on a run and I felt a twinge in my right knee.  It wasn’t painful and I didn’t think much else of it…until later that night when I could barely walk.  I eliminated running from my training schedule, but that didn’t resolve the pain, so I started physical therapy a couple of weeks later.  My physical therapist (the great Dr. Adam Ruszkowski) restricted me from running for a total of seven weeks.  When he cleared me to run again, he told me I had to start with running intervals of 90 seconds followed by walking intervals of three minutes for a total of 20 minutes of activity.  I’ve been using a run/walk strategy in all of my runs since I developed Long COVID, but this ratio of running to walking was substantially different from my usual (which has been five minutes of running followed by 90 seconds of walking) and the volume was substantially less than I had been doing prior to my knee injury.

This injury was particularly frustrating because I don’t know what actually caused it.  For all other injuries I’ve sustained over the years, I can identify the cause.  It’s either an acute accident (such as crashing my bike) or an overuse injury stemming from a poor choice I made or something I tried to get away with in training or racing (such as doing too much too soon or not doing enough strength training).  But this time, none of those things were in play.  Frustrating, but some things in life are just meant to be Great Mysteries of The Universe.

I asked Dr. Adam a couple of weeks out what he thought about my possibly doing the Mountain Goat Run.  He knows it’s a meaningful race for me, so he gave me some guidance on markers I’d need to hit in training to be able to be cleared for it.  I was able to hit all of those markers, so he cleared me to do the race with some really strict rules:

1. I had to be willing to quit, withdraw from the race, and take a DNF if I felt any sustained pain at any point during the race.
2. I had to stick to two minutes of running followed by three minutes of walking for all ten miles.  (This meant I’d be walking 60% of the race.)
3. I had to walk all downhills, even if the downhill was falling during a planned run segment.  (So, this meant I’d be walking more than 60% of the race.)

I agreed to these terms, and started at the back of the pack, which is where I stayed for the entirety of the race. I never felt any pain, so I finished all ten miles. I stuck to the rules, trusted and leveraged my experience, took my own advice (the same advice I dole out to athletes on a daily basis), and had a phenomenal race that I am so proud of.

The Bottom Line

By most other people’s measurement and assessment - which relies on the numerical representation of my race (aka my finish time) - this year’s Mountain Goat Run was a bust, both when you compare my finish time against everyone else who ran in this year’s race and when you compare my finish time against my own past finish times.  But I know - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that Sunday’s race was one of the best I’ve ever executed in my athletic career, and I’ll ride that high as long as it’ll last.

As I mentioned, that first Mountain Goat Run in 2010 taught me so much about myself that it altered the course of my life.  I’m 15 years older now.  How utterly beautiful and marvelous that this same race can still teach me things about myself during my 14th running of it.  This - among so many other reasons - is why the Mountain Goat Run is - and forever will be - my favorite race.