To finish my 2010 racing season (and to have another double race weekend on record, after the Bierathlon/Cüplilauf from the day before), I participated in Zurich’s Silvesterlauf last Sunday. It takes place just next to where I live in the inner city, it’s a five minutes walk to the start from my place. I raced in the standard division, where the course is over four of these laps:

I live just north of the map.

I did the race in 2008 and 2009, but I was never really prepared, so of course I wanted to smash my PB. A (very fast) friend of mine asked if he could shower at my place after the race, so together we headed towards the start about one hour early.

The race for mixed couples was on, and we hung around for the start of the elite divisions. For them, it’s the last race of the Swiss Post Cup, the most important race series (for pros) in Switzerland, so quite a few well-known people were racing. Viktor Röthlin didn’t participate, but he fired the starting gun.

We then headed to pick up our race packages. We weren’t quite sure where that would be and walked in the wrong direction at first, but finally we got our stuff. I now own three Odlo hats with a Silvesterlauf logo.

We thought of leaving our stuff in the starting area in the official wardrobe container, but once in there, we decided not to, it was just too crowded. The idea popped up to just bring our things back to my place, and we got a real good warm-up by running there.

Surprisingly, our starting time was suddenly just ten minutes away and we were still at my place! The warm-up got more and more intense. We split up because my friend had to take care of important business, and I ran to the starting line.

I arrived five minutes before the start, and even though they send the more than 15’000 participants away in many waves, it was super crowded. I didn’t quite dare to climb over the fence to get to the very front, so I ended up about ten metres from the starting line in a tightly packed crowd.

That didn’t cost me much time, though, maybe half a minute or so. Nothing tragic. But next year I’ll be there a few minutes earlier.

I wanted to run consistently faster than 4 min/km, just like in Basel. Even with all the people and the somewhat slow start, the first kilometre was in that range. There’s a nasty ascent in the small loop at the north end of the course, but it didn’t slow me down too much.

My legs felt okay during all of the race, but I felt like not getting enough oxygen to keep the system running at such a high pace. The third lap was the slowest, but whenever I checked on my legs, they were doing fine.

Towards the end, I started lapping the slowest people of my wave; just a few of them and I almost didn’t notice. The fastest people (like my friend) get the full treatment of almost complete clogging by the slowest, but I haven’t heard of any serious fights.

I had enough energy for quite a long all-out sprint in the end (video of that here), so either I didn’t give it a 100% before or my stamina has magically become superb from not doing intervals ever. It was enough for that PB, though!

Here’s what my Garmin recorded:

The city is about the worst enviromnet for precise GPS signals, I didn’t run that eratically. Just wanted to show off the pretty city once again.

We headed quickly to my place after the race (Mr. Fast had to wait about 3:30 mins for me) to get a nice hot shower. After a while, I headed back to the race for the fun categories, which get to run in the dark. That makes for pretty sights, for example at Rennweg:

The last category was running only half the distance, but almost everybody there is running in costume. Some group themes included about a dozen of angels running with one devil, a bunch of christmas trees complete with lighting, or two guys running in bathings shorts with a rubber duck around the two of them.

This double race weekend actually lends itself perfectly for some costume extravaganza, and if you just keep on the costume from Bierathlon, it’s even very time efficient!

This having been my last race of 2010, it’s time to review the whole year, stay tuned! The goal is to have that post up before 2011.