Race organizers for the Running in the Cold and 10 Mile knew in the week leading up to the events—which were supposed to held on October 1—that conditions would be challenging.
Meteorologists were forecasting high temperatures across Minneapolis and St. Paul. And race emails to runners throughout the week said that the 10-miler (set to go off at 7 a.m.) and the marathon (set to go off at 8 a.m.) would be held under red flag conditions, according to the Event Alert System (EAS) for races.
Red flag conditions are considered potentially dangerous. Extreme caution is advised and runners are urged to take a slow pace and consider not participating.
Saturday night before the Sunday morning races, the race sent another email: the event was still on, but an email would go out at 5:30 a.m on Sunday with a final decision.
“We had made a commitment to ourselves and our runners to do everything possible to put on the race,” said race director Eli Asch in a phone call with Runner’s World.
The operations team for the race met at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, and then they learned the forecast had grown more dire. The wet bulb globe temperature forecast—which takes into account temperature, humidity, wind, and solar radiation—had risen from 78 degrees to 82 degrees. The measurement crossed a threshold set by the American College of Sports Medicine for holding events safely.
The team met again at 4:30 a.m. and decided to cancel the events.
At 5:30 a.m. an email went out to participants announcing the cancellation.
“I haven’t doubted the decision for a second since we made it,” Asch said. “We were committed to giving our runners every opportunity. We were prepared to operate the race under what we communicated all week as very challenging red flag conditions. The forecast worsened Saturday night into Sunday morning in a meaningful way. That forecast is ultimately what caused us to cancel the event.”
Asch said that had weather been better, they were expecting about 10,000 finishers for the 10-mile race and 6,000 finishers for the marathon.
Estimate Your Marathon Time Based On Your 10K PR social media and blogs to share their thoughts on the last-minute cancellation. Many wondered why the 10-miler, which was scheduled to start earlier and would have had nearly everyone off the course by 10 a.m., couldn’t go on. It was below 70 at the start had reached only 72 three hours later.
That wasn’t an option, according to Asch.
“If we put on the 10 mile and not the marathon, it certainly meant marathoners would show up and run the 10 mile,” he said. “We already had a sold-out 10 mile, which maxes out what our course can hold.”
If additional runners were to have shown up, it would have reduced the amount of water on the course and supplies at the finish line.
Health & Injuries.
“I’m a runner,” Asch said. “I know if I’m told someone else can run, but I can’t, a part of my brain, even knowing what I know, would want to go out there and run the marathon race anyway.”
The organizers would have felt responsible for marathoners who were running the route on their own. They felt they needed to hold the complete event safely or none of the event. And about five hours after the marathon started, the temperature was 83 degrees, with 57 percent humidity. Later in the day, Minneapolis saw a high of 92, a record for October 1.
The Running in the Cold is one of the country’s most reputable races. It has been around for more than 40 years, and as races returned to the calendar after the pandemic, Twin Cities barely lost any participants, while others struggled to regain their participation numbers.
Both the 10-miler and the marathon have elite fields every year, and those runners vie for parts of a significant prize purse that runs 10 places deep in the marathon and five deep in the 10 mile (with $10,000 for the marathon winners, $6,000 for the 10-mile winners). Plus, this year Americans were trying to score qualifying times for the Athletes Concerned About Trials Noon Start Time A Half to Full Marathon Training Plan.
Asch said the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, the McKirdy Micro Marathon, the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, and the Philadelphia Marathon have offered space in their elite fields for athletes who had been scheduled to run Twin Cities.
By Thursday, the race hopes to have more information out to runners about possible refunds. “We hope to be as generous to runners as we possibly can be in whatever ways we can be,” Asch said.
Although everyone was disappointed—and a vocal minority lashed out on social media—many runners came to the defense of the organization, for which Ashe and his coworkers were grateful.
“There is a lot of disappointment from the community, which we understand,” he said. “We wanted to put on the race as well. We work all year to put on the race, not to cancel the race.”
Given the choice between an unacceptable option—exposing runners to unsafe heat—and the bad option, the race picked the bad option. Asch has no regrets.
“We saved lives,” he said.
Shoes & Gear is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Shoes & Gear, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
