Aimee Ault's Staging Area

“The marathon before the marathon” — transit there was mostly pretty good. Shuttle buses once again for another year had issues and didn’t drop runners off at the actual drop-off point and required a half mile walk, which was unfortunate.

Having run Chicago the previous year, I was really curious how the two would compare and they felt pretty similar. NYC had phenomenal crowd support and the only dull moment was the Queensboro Bridge where the crowd isn’t allowed.

The Queensboro Bridge is a beast. It is not a steep beast. It is just a very long uphill slog that slowly eats away at you. There are two additional bridges after it up in the Bronx but they are comparatively mild and/or short.

There were parts of Brooklyn and Willimsborough where there wasn’t good crowd control and as a result, the course itself became bottlenecked and runners were slowed down to a walking pace, which leads me to my next concern: People just stopping running randomly without warning. I broke a toe tripping and almost falling into a retainer wall thanks to multiple people being unpredictable. I did not have this problem at Chicago–there’s just too many people on too narrow of a course–you can PR here, but understand that all of the various “people” problems will impact you from setting specific goals for a PR (I really wanted to sub-4 but it just was not possible due to human factors outside of my control).

I know that’s a lot of nits but this race is AMAZING all the same–the energy, the emotion, the whole vibe—it makes up for the issues in spades. Wear your name on your shirt–you will have all of the supporters/fans in the world screaming your name in the most sincere fashion. Did I meet my goal time? No. But did I feel like a freaking badass? Oh hell yeah.

Adding one more data point that the 2023 course was totally off on measurement–registered 13.4 miles. What should have been a 2+ minute PR became a 10 second PR, which felt incredibly frustrating after all the effort.

I just didn’t love this race, despite it being what should have been a great race for a PR.

Couple of places on the course that were vaguely confusing or just not set up well. First was entering Churchill Downs–you have to make an abrupt sharp turn going into the entrance that forces you to slow down. Second was at the point where half/full split–it shouldn’t have been confusing but the volunteers that were yelling were making it unnecessarily complicated.

Crowd support was a little weak in some places–I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those who ran the full and went over into Indiana.

Finish line was kind of far from the start line and I don’t think there were shuttles. Ended up being a 1.5 mile walk back to my hotel 😬

Host hotel was downtown near the start line but for some reason the expo—which would have been awesome if it were in the convention center one block from the host hotel—turned out to be a few miles away nowhere near downtown.

No real race communication from the organizers outside of the expo.

I kind of expected this race, for its size, to be on par with the Indy Mini (I think partly because both are called Mini, both have about a 10k turnout total, and both involve running on some sort of race track), but it just was an underwhelming imitation at best.

My one gripe with this race is how misleading the course elevation profile was. The graph made it look like most of the trail portion would be a steady downhill, but looking at it more closely, 1/3 of the graph actually represents like the last 2 miles only 🥴.

It was my first trail race ever. Road portion was hilly but a blast. Trail portion was a mixed bag. A lot of up and down hills, very narrow. I rolled my ankle and because it was so narrow people wouldn’t pass me so I had to keep running at pace and then unfortunately rolled that same ankle a second time and ended up with a pretty gnarly sprain. I finished reasonably fast and the scenery more than made up for the pain, but woof. When they say 4/5 difficulty, believe it.

The Indy Mini was my first in-person half, now two years running it, and I’d easily recommend it for any first-time runner. It’s a very flat course overall (one exception: there is a notable high grade downhill and then uphill heading into the race track).

Crowd support was present for about 90% of the course, water/gatorade stations every mile on both your left and right which is great, around mile 10 there was a water mister station set up as well as one just past the finish line–I didn’t really think it was necessary for 2023 but I appreciated that it was there.

Race track is a little over 2 miles of the entire course and it’s definitely worth flagging that you should be mindful of where on the track you run to avoid getting leg imbalanced since it’s slightly curved–I honestly think that’s why mile 9 is where people start to kind of struggle, because their form falls apart on that segment.

There’s a tradition where people stop, drop to the ground, and kiss the bricks at the brickyard–be aware that people in front of you may abruptly stop there to do that 😅

I’m happy this was my first half last year and now running it a subsequent year, glad to know that it wasn’t just coincidentally good the first time around. It’s a very well thought out race.