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| 2015 TC 1 Mile Champions Garrett Heath and Heather Kampf |
The Medtronic Twin Cities 1 Mile is one of the
premier road miles in the United States.
It has hosted Olympic medalists and has borne witness to several
sub-four-minute miles. In addition to a
top-flight pro race, the TC 1 Mile features several "open" waves,
which usually total over two thousand finishers. The traditional course was flat and very
fast. This year, the installation of a
new light-rail transit line forced the course through downtown Minneapolis to
be changed, likely permanently.
This course change was announced a few months ago,
and after researching the elevation profile of the new course, which gains
about 30 feet of elevation in the first half mile before flattening out, I
published an article in which I predicted the new course would be five to eight seconds slower.
The race itself, which happened last Thursday, was
held on a cool, rainy evening with slight winds. Weather data pegs the exact conditions at 54
degrees F, light rain, and 9 mph winds at race time—certainly not conducive to
the very fastest times, but not terrible.
The winner, Garrett Heath (a Minnesota native), took the win in 4:08,
which was a sharp contrast to Nick Willis' blistering 3:56 course record the
last time the race was held. Heath
himself was runner-up in that race with a 3:57.
By looking just at the pro results, the new course
looks substantially slower than the old one, but you could chalk this up to
cautious tactics early in the race, or just a fluke from a small sample
size. To get a real answer on how much
slower the new course was, and how accurate my prediction was, we'll have to do
some statistical analysis.
The rest of this article will go in detail on the
methods I used to compute how slow the course actually was, but if you're just
looking for a quick conversion, here it is: For competitive runners, the 2015
TC 1 Mile was 13 ± 3 seconds slower than
the 2013 course. A more accurate conversion is to multiply your 2015 race time by 0.9581 to get the equivalent 2013
time and multiply your time by 0.009 for the uncertainty.
