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Hot Chocolate 15k - Matt Aaronson

MattAaronsonMattAaronson
in Races & Places 🏁⛺

 

Today was the annual Hot Chocolate 15k race in Chicago. It is an incredibly poorly-run affair that features a major logistical snafu each year despite continually drawing 40k+ people to the 15k and 5k races. But I am one of the lemmings, and find it a well-timed mid-distance race to keep me motivated to run 3x/week well after the conclusion of my tri season. This year the problem was packet pickup, which treated people to 3 hour wait on Friday before they "overhauled the process" and got wait times down to a mere 90 minutes on Saturday. Lucky for me I only spent 30 minutes in line since I went early on Saturday morning to beat the crowds.

 

Overall the race itself seemed to go off just fine. But then again, I was in the "A" corral so didn't have to wait too long for my start. By the time I finished just over an hour later the final corral was just STARTING so I can imagine some people will complain that the staggered start resulted in a lot of waiting in the cold 40-ish degree temps.

 

I approached the race pretty casually as a "C" race and my main goal was to use the race to make sure I held a good effort for a "long run" of the week. I did skip my Saturday bike ride yesterday, although truth be told I was meaning to ride but EN-ers Ed Gross and Matt Ward bailed on me. There was certainly a decent amount of eating and drinking – esp drinking – on Friday and Saturday evenings. So I was not exactly "peaking".

 

The race itself was pretty unremarkable. I started near the back of the corral and without a warmup. It took me some time to get up to speed and my first couple of miles were uncharacteristically slow – in a race I usually start a bit fast and have to pull back, but in this case I just sort of settled in and ran at a pretty comfortable effort level. I didn't really pay a ton of attention to the Garmin, and even if I did it would have probably misled me since there were several parts of the course that went through long tunnels or under overpasses etc. So I just hit the lap button at each mile marker and got into a nice groove. My entire nutrition was a gel about 5 minutes before the start of the race. It was pretty cool so I didn't take fluids at any aid station…I was a true "diesel locomotive" just pounding out constant-pace miles. In an "A" race I would have gotten into some serious mental games trying to pick off the people in front of me, draft off of people into the wind, run the absolute most efficient line, etc, but in this case I really just enjoyed the race.

 

At mile 7.5 or so I couldn't resist picking up the pace just a bit, and this wasn't difficult since there was a dude who had been behind me for 2 miles with a strange stride that had his shoes "slapping" the pavement and annoying the crap out of me. Not surprisingly at mile 9 I found I had quite a bit left to give for the final 1/3 mile, so I increased my pace by about 30 sec per mile for the homestretch.

 

My chip time ended up as 1:03:35, official pace 6:50. The Garmin said 6.41 miles and a pace of 6:46. My placing was 198/16195 overall, 163/4901 males, 23/734 in M3539 division. The VDOT based on the "official" time was exactly 50.0, so that is a decline of 1.5 from my top VDOT in the springtime at the end of the OS (set in a 10k). The VDOT based on Garmin data is 50.6. For the record, this was technically a PR at the 15k distance, but that isn't saying much because I've only ever done a 15k race in the offseason and never when in top form.

 


 

My pacing was pretty consistent. The official chip-based splits were:

5k – 21:04 (6:47/mile)

10k – 42:31 (6:50/mile), 21:27 for the 5k interval (6:54/mile)

15k – 73:35 (6:49/mile), 21:04 for the 5k interval (6:47/mile)

 

Yes, I ran the first and last 5k in the EXACT SAME TIME!!

 

My HR was very consistent and pretty much exactly what I expected given the RPE and paces. Excluding the first couple of miles where the HR data is clearly erroneous (assume strap was dried out) my HR was pretty much constant in the low-mid 170s until mile 7, then high 170's rising to low 180's. Max was 190 right at the finish. I usually do z4 intervals in the low-mid 180s but given the low temperatures these HRs seem very reasonable and imply a slight undercooking of the race effort but surely not a total throwaway jog.


Mile Avg Pace Avg HR Max HR Avg cadence
1 06:39     92
2 06:47     91
3 06:49 171 177 90
4 06:41 171 174 90
5 06:55 174 181 91
6 06:45 176 181 90
7 06:49 178 182 90
8 06:49 178 187 90
9 06:45 182 186 89
9.3 06:24 183 190 90
Total 06:46     90

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