The 2023 Pearl Street Mile
Human sticks hit the bricks of Boulder's famously goofy pedestrian marketplace on Saturday evening in encouraging numbers
The Pearl Street Mile is a downtown-Boulder August tradition that usually draws multiple spectators I count as friends but, at the point the PSM rolls around, haven’t seen in a while. That’s why, after making my sole annual journey out of the house to watch other people run last Saturday, I decided to again suck it up and wander down to the event, reminding myself all the while that I wouldn’t have to do this again for another 365 days or so. Maybe 366, with 2024 being a leap year unless progressive astronomers declare the entire concept racist in what promises to be an abundantly liberating autumn.
The good news: Last year, a total of 252 runners finished the mile, with another 30 kids completing the 12-and-under 800 meters. This included 27 finishers of the elite men’s race, 14 finishers of the elite women’s race, and 11 finishers of the combined-gender elite master’s race—all of whom were men. An additional 200 runners rolled into the chute in the various citizen waves. Of those 252 finishers (not including the kids’ 800 meters), 158 were male (62.7 percent).
This year, the mile field ballooned to 324 runners and the kids’ event spiked to 58 finishers, increases of 28.6 percent and 93.3 percent, respectively. Alarmingly, the preponderance of male finishers rose by four percentage points from 2002 to 66.7 percent, but at least the elite masters’ event—while still in the main a march of hairy throats with prominent larynxes—was not a categorical sausage-party.
Also, a 94-year-old woman completed the course in 24 minutes and 57 seconds, while a man I’m guessing is her husband started the race but was unable to finish. I hope he’s okay.
Both of these people have both more guts and more gusto for life than I ever did. I like to think I would have been as impressed by this as a teenager as I am now, but sadly, at least according to most sources, I was even dumber then.
The PSM has been run on a variety of courses, none of them fast. The route has stabilized under the management of Lee Troop into a criterium event that resembles a track mile as closely as any layout in downtown Boulder can: About 3.7 loops around a square block measuring around 430 meters.
It’s interesting to consider that the faster a runner is, the more time he or she loses in any road race with a high density of corners in relation to a track race of the same length. The Pearl Street Mile has fourteen right-angle turns. Someone who turns in an effort worth four minutes flat on the track might not break 4:08 here—more on that soon—whereas someone who runs an effort worth eight minutes not only won’t bleed away a proportional amount of time on the turns, which would be 16 seconds, but might actually lose less absolute time.
I took a photo of Rosie watching the lead elite women just after they started their second lap.
Rosie, at almost nine and a half, is intimately familiar with running humans, but really doesn’t know what to make of stationary people screaming at humans as they run by, and seems to assume we* in the crowd should all be chasing them instead of letting them escape, only to inexplicably return to the scene of the chaos multiple times in short order.
I spent most of the two or so hours I spent downtown in a series of impromptu jabfests. I was more interested in what the data from the races would reveal about the year-over-year entry numbers (already discussed) and faster runners who competed in both the Mile High Mile last Saturday (results) and the PSM But there were surprisingly few elite names appearing in both results, although Austen Dahlquist won both elite-division male races.
Dahlquist ran 4:02.55 on Fairview High School’s track, negative-splitting the race, and 4:17 at the PSM. But he clearly didn’t have to work nearly as hard in the road race. Meanwhile, two visiting Japanese women who ran 5:15 and 5:19 last weekend finished the PSM in 5:12 and 5:14. I suspect those two, are still getting used to the altitude, based on the brief reporting of the one who fell in love with Rosie during the MHM.
Seeing the race numbers expand by such a large amount was really encouraging. If Boulder were truly the runner-friendly town people hilariously think it is—and we must not confuse the terrain here with people who purchase chunks of it to live on—then Troopy wouldn’t be forced to confine all of the races he puts on longer than a mile to the road looping though office parks far from residential areas. Those are fine, but none of the local residents want races on “their” streets, because such an affront might inconvenience them for a whole half of a morning. In fact, every other city I’ve lived in has been more accommodating of road races than this repository for malign former Californians and random hedge-funders from all over the country is, including the even more idiotically snobby city of Boca Raton, Florida.
While it’s fun to make excuses to take shots at the local citizenry, the main point here is that Lee Troop is doing an even better job with these races than it looks because he runs afoul of far more citizen resistance than is evident to non-locals.
I wonder if one of the cranky coots in the Cherryvale neighborhood known for littering Nextdoor.com with gripes about hyperactive joggers in East Boulder is the person who must have hacked Troopy’s Wikipedia page.
While Troopy is a few years and brews away from his competitive weight, I’m pretty sure he was never 20 pounds less than I am now, with a BMI of 16.8. Even after he lost his hair, he had to be ten pounds more than that. But if this page is somehow correct, then his wife Freyja needs to continue feeding and watering him as much as she’s currently doing so that he retains the vigor to put on community road races. I may not have a nonagenarian’s get-up-and-go for actually racing, but I can still gossip and rumormonger with some of the all-time greats, so these races have to remain a strong and growing draw wherever they’re situated for as long as I’m here.
Dave Albo has posted some photos from the event on his Instagram account.