Navigating a "Big City" Race

The Do's and Don'ts to racing a bigger race

Oct 28, 2022

By no means is Atlantic City a “big city” race, I learned a lot about how to prepare for a big city race that I’d love to share with you totday.

There are definitely advantages to running a big city race compared to your local 5k or 10k that make the appeal of running a bigger race more enticing.

But when you make that decision, there are things you don’t normally think about that I want to shed some light on today.

Should you stay over?
Or should you do the drive in the morning?
How/when will you get your bib?
How much time do you allot for parking?
How will you navigate warmups and bag drop off?
After the race, how will you cool down, get your gear, and begin refueling?

Staying Close to the Race

There are obvious benefits to staying really close to the race. You’re there, you can do your morning routine a little easier knowing how close you are to the start line. There’s a little pressure off of driving, parking, and finding your bearings when you’re in a new city and you’ve just traveled.

The negatives are, of course, the price of accommodations, but beyond that, there aren’t too many negatives to staying close by the night before the race.

Drive Morning Of

I decided to drive the 60 minutes to AC - which was made easier because 98% of humans are still sleeping at 7 am on a Saturday morning.

While the drive was uneventful, the idea of having to get up that much earlier wasn’t appealing, but was the only option I had for the weekend.

Weighing driving in vs staying over night was the only big question mark I had in the whole weekend and while it was relatively painless to do the drive, if I could do it again, I would probably try and stay overnight.

Bib Pickup

Because I didn’t stay over, I had the big stressor of figuring out how to get my bib. This particular race didn’t do day-of packet pickup which added to the need to potentially stay over. I made sent a hail mary big-favor-ask to our Run856 group and at the 11th hour a complete stranger was able to pick up my bib for me. Got lucky there, for sure.

Parking

I get all the bad feels when I’m at the race location and can’t find parking. It’s probably a universal feeling, but it’s probably when I’m at my worse and I make bad decisions.

Pre-Race

The next issue I ran into was how I was going to wrm up, change clothes and shoes, and make it back to the start line. While it would have been a lot smoother if I had a non-running buddy there to carry gear, I had to make the decision to warm up in racing shoes (not a big deal) and bring my racing top with me on the easy 15 minute run.

This would have been a bigger deal and more of an issue if the weather wasn’t perfect for racing, so in a way, I got lucky. Just before the start of the race, I ditched my warmup pants and shirt and stashed them just off the course where I hoped no one would scoop them up as their own.

Post-Race

Similar to before the race, but way less important, was getting my clothes back, getting in some easy jogging, and waiting around for awards. Again, having someone there to sherpa my shit around would have been nice, but I totally made do.

Overall, I made some good decisions and definitely got lucky that the whole morning went as well as it did. It could have gone sideways a lots of different points, but I kept it together and used my experience to pull off a really good race.

3rd place overall

GPS data: 6.06 miles, 6:01 pace