Wind: It Doesn't Take Much

But little Mouse, you are not alone,

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

—To a Mouse, Robert Burns

I was wishing I were a little mouse when I turned and began heading east on my run this morning. A little mouse: so close to the ground, such a low profile. And what aerodynamics with that pointy nose.

Instead, I was a big ol’ air-catching dude, and the 15-20 mph easterlies were making it way more difficult than it should have been for me to maintain my 7:15/mile pace. This got me thinking again about the wind conditions we might face Sunday morning at the California International Marathon. Now, I spoke with George in the Sacramento office of the National Weather Service this afternoon, and he was pretty certain wind won’t be a big deal Sunday morning. He figured that at worst we might see some winds from the south or west around 5 mph. But George is a normal person, not a runner, and he might not realize that when it comes to headwinds, it doesn’t take much to derail precarious and ambitious personal-best designs. From running writer and coach Bob Glover over at the New York Road Runners site:

The slower the runner, the more time lost due to a headwind. According to Dr. Jack Daniels, a three-hour marathon runner loses 11 seconds per mile when running into a 5-mile-per-hour headwind and 25 seconds per mile when facing a 10-mile-per-hour headwind. That's an extra 5 to 11 minutes over the marathon distance; but a four-hour marathoner running the entire race into the wind loses approximately 15 to 32 minutes with the same winds.

Glover has some advice for dealing with headwinds:

When running into the wind, lean forward slightly to decrease the resistance. Stay relaxed maintaining good running form and conserving energy. Try to tuck in behind others to reduce the wind resistance. Look for a big runner and keep as close as you can to properly "draft." Chester Kyle, a professor of mechanics at California State University, reports you cut wind resistance by 31 percent if you stay 10 feet behind another runner; by 51 percent if you're within 5 feet. If you're with a pack of runners on a windy day, take turns shielding each other from the wind. Hang with a group as long as you can. The effort will be far easier than if battling headwind alone.

Now it's far from certain you'll need to embrace these tips. In fact, there is a timing and direction scenario on the low coming down from the Pacific Northwest that would give us northerly winds, particularly early on Sunday morning. If that happens, you might confidently go out a little faster than you'd plan. According to Glover, "The three-hour marathoner runs 8 seconds per mile faster with a 5-mile-per-hour tailwind and 18 seconds faster with a 10-mile-per-hour tailwind. The four-hour marathoner, however, gets pushed along even more at between 10 and 24 seconds per mile!"