R and J in the USA

August 17, 2024

Nothing runs like a Deere, the John Deere company boasts. 85 runners gathered at the John Deere Tractor & Engine Museum on an overcast Saturday morning in Waterloo, Iowa, to test that slogan.

The John Deere Waterloo 5K took place at the company’s Waterloo Works, home of foundry operations, service parts operations, drivetrain operations, warehouses, and the aforementioned museum. This is where they make the machines. The complex is so large that a single loop around its perimeter road was all that was needed to cover the 3.1 miles of the 5K.

The view to the left of the flat, clockwise oval changed from expressway to river to miscellaneous commercial buildings. And to the right, always, the John Deere complex.

The overall winner ran like a Deere, finishing in 16:18 – a 5:14 per mile pace. The next three runners finished in the eighteen-minute range, and the rest of the field came in at twenty minutes or more. The top female finisher, finishing 5^th overall, clocked in at 20:06, almost two and a half minutes ahead of her closest female rival. (Full race results here.)

For the second race in a row, Julie and Ryan had the same age-group finish. They improved on Wisconsin’s double 2^nd place finishes and both took 1^st in their age group. Julie finished 5^th of 34 females and 22^nd of 85 overall. Ryan finished 12^th of 51 males and 15^th overall.

A neat thing about a race taking place at a museum is that there is a museum to see, so we saw it. We followed the history of John Deere farm equipment from the first handmade horse-drawn, walk-behind, single-row plow to the most recent track-driven behemoth to roll off the factory floor.

As we’ve ventured farther from home, us being from Rochester, NY, has become more of a novelty to the people we encounter. After learning that a couple from New York participated in the race, a museum employee sought us out while we were touring the museum to thank us from visiting from so far away. It was a nice warm fuzzy to cap off the morning.

Detailed Race Report for Running Nerds

When the race director yelled “go” at the small but vibrant run outside the John Deere Museum in Waterloo, Ryan and Julie took off together at a fairly steady pace hovering around eight minute miles. Somewhere after the first quarter mile Julie dipped for just a bit and Ryan pulled ahead. Julie recovered back to that pace and steadied out somewhere around 8:15s for the bulk of the next two miles. As is now the pattern, Julie’s race game is about holding steady at what she starts with and then working to hold onto it in mile three. Ryan’s, a more prudent race approach, is to start to running at a certain feeling, and over the miles his body loosens up and that same feeling turns into a faster pace.

Julie remembers the days when she used to run like that. She hasn’t been able to find it on this trip, as she has often found that her usual easy run feeling doesn’t seem to match what she can easily sustain like it used to. She always starts out a race with a pace that feels strong, solid, and easy to maintain, but peters out later in the race. She’s tried running slower than what feels easy in the early miles, and while it is more likely to produce negative splits, it just feels so unnatural and difficult to maintain, so she has surrendered to this particular race pattern. The difference shows in their respective splits. Ryan clocked mile 1 at 8:13, with Julie just behind him at 8:15. Mile 2 for Julie was fairly steady at 8:17. By this point, Ryan was loose and rolling in at 7:43. Julie finished off working hard to maintain and slowing down a bit to 8:26 while Ryan was only just getting into the groove and closing out mile 3 with a 7:19.

Somewhere in the middle of mile 3, where Julie usually starts to feel the real pain, it really settled in for Julie and she decided, rather than to push through the pain, that she’d stop and walk for just a few seconds. It actually turned out to be a decent strategy. Obviously, it would have been better if she didn’t need to stop at all, but, after these brief 5-10 second stops, when she would start running again, she was juiced up and running 7:40s. She ended up doing two such stops in the 3rd mile and still managed to clock in at an 8:26. Julie’s average pace was 8:14. Ryan’s was 7:43. 

In their very first moments of arriving in Iowa, after Ryan and Julie accomplished the long sought-after goal of finally posting the blog and finishing a series of state-by-state write ups that would be rolled out over the following weeks once pictures got into each of them, Julie felt a surge of relief to be able to check that off the list. That relief turned into a deep restoration experience during the first two days in Iowa. This added relief seemed to translate into Iowa’s run quite nicely. While her splits were actually almost identical to Wisconsin’s race the weekend prior, her average heart rate dropped from 163 down to 156 and the most significant element of that was that, for the first time in a LONG while, her heart rate was lowest at the END of the race. In Wisconsin, her splits were 8:18, 8:14 and 8:25, with a pickup pace for the last 0.12 (or .18 according to her watch for Wisconsin) at 7:04. In Iowa, she had near identical splits of 8:15, 8:17 and 8:26, but with a final push at 5:55 for the last 0.12 miles. Despite the consistency in splits, at least according to Julie’s watch, the Iowa race clocked in at exactly 5K and gave her a return to a sub-26:00 race, clocking in at 25:39. This was a first in a while and Julie was feeling pretty great about it. Ryan was showing signs of fairly consistently reduction in his times every handful of races. Iowa’s race was no different as he crossed the finish line in 24:11. 

Julie made the prediction that, following this pattern, by the next race he would be in the 23s and that before Alaska, he would be solidly in the 22’s. Further, she predicted that, by California at the absolute latest, and probably before, he’d be solidly in the 21’s. While Julie is fairly confident in most of those predictions, she is only willing to log a suspicion rather than a full-on prediction for this last one – that, before the trip is done, Ryan will drop below a 20 minute 5K, or, if not, at least come very close. We shall see. Julie’s original goal after seeing her performance in our first 5K in DC was to see if she could get herself down to a 22 something. That goal is beginning to feel more and more like a pipe dream. It is easily there in her muscle fitness, but her heart conditioning doesn’t seem to be on board, and a steady travel schedule month after month with consistent racing amidst it, though it all seems to be acting as no obstacle for Ryan, does not seem likely to be in Julie’s favor. That said, with 36 states and their respective 5Ks to go, there’s plenty of room for dreams to come true, even those of the pipe nature. 

As for the scoreboard, for those keeping score, which of course, we aren’t, the balance has officially tipped in Iowa. Julie 7, Ryan 8.