ESSAY
FINISHING LAST, PART II Following up with Philip Erickson BY PHILIP ERICKSON
F
or the spring 2019 issue of RunMinnesota, I wrote an article
entitled “Finishing Last”. It was about the Ron Daws 25K that I ran in 2014. This article continues that same theme, only with different races. There were three of them in 2019 that met the standard I set in the 2014 Ron Daws. The races and times were: Securian Half Marathon: 3:07 (finish: next to last) MDRA 15K: 2:22 (finish: last) Twin Cities Marathon 6:25 clock removed at 6:20 (but surprisingly did not finish dead last with a 6:25 showing on my Garmin)
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SPRING 2020
Securian Half Marathon
I have a regular routine the morning of a race. One is to check the weather on KSTP with Jonathan Yuhas. For reasons I don’t recall, I failed to check with Yuhas the morning of the Securian. It was a bad mistake. Here’s why. I had chosen my adidas Aerobounce to run in. They are good shoes for running on dry pavement, but really bad on ice or snow. If you were to put your hand on the bottom of the Aerobounce and drag it the length, you would find narrow indentations, but not the kind of indentations that grab onto snow. When I was on the Green Line to get to the Securian, I looked out the window and saw flakes of snow. The last forecast I saw (the night before) said nothing about snow, but Yuhas probably had! Fast forwarding: it snowed the entire race, about two inches worth. If I knew that was going to happen, I would have worn my Hoka Challengers, which are great on trails and snow. Unfortunately, I was still wearing my summertime adidas. This meant for every step forward there was a small slippage back. This slippage continued for 13.1 miles.
