They are off and so will you be. Stay relaxed and confidence but get where you want to be. Don’t let the wild brace for position leave you straggled. Stay focused and start implementing your race plan. We can't show you the course exactly as it looks on race morning because any of these surrounded by rival harriers. Aside from that though let's take a look at the course as you’ll see it on race morning at Van Cortlandt. Nice, light, starting area. No need to go out too fast just get in position. It's about 600 meters from the start to the first turn which is way down at the end of this field.
As you can see it's a nice white field. Right now it's solid dirt. By November, it starts to get a little muddy sometimes. So check it out ahead of time, make sure you have got the place that you want. About 400 meters into the race, you’ll pass the eventual finish line where those two poles are and then from there you have about 200 meters to the first turn. After you make that first turn you are going to go down this way, pass the mansion and off in the distance 360 meters, is the next turn, the next pole. You are going to make a big sweeping turn around that pole and then head to the left.
When you get here you are going to be not quite of at a mile, and you’ll see the hole here, and that will mark the end of the flat from the beginning of the cowpath. Up until now you have had plenty of room, and there’s a lots of space to move around people, to move up. But about here you are going to find out that things narrow down. But you don’t want to think about getting into position certainly as you start up the cowpath because you can go past it, but it gets a little narrow and little stretchy.
This is a cowpath about 650 meters long and as you can see it's a nice, even surface. It wasn’t always like this, really up until the 80s and 90s and in time very red and very hard to run on, dangerous. Now the city replaced the surface with this nice, fresh, finely cut grass and so you won't have any problem with the footing. Not everyone likes that by the way. Some people think instead of ruin the out beyond of Van Cortlandt. But as far as I am concerned, obvious only get you so far and I think this course is a lot safer and lot faster.
The one problem which you are going to notice is you’ll see these rail road tiles that will come along about every 10, 15 meters. And you are going to have try to keep a nice outline of sight so that you can see those things coming and get over them. About 75 meters after you start off of the cowpath, you come up here to the one mile rock and that’s the first rise on the course. As soon as you pass the rock it's going to start down a little downhill so you get a little bit of raft after that one mile rock. You look around here, you see it's nice and leafy, and there are over hundreds of leaves here and branches and all that. And maybe if you run later in year it's going to look much more like this. So keep that in mind and just remember that if you get on to your back trail, keep looking for that person ahead of you and keep trying to stay with him.
Just past the mile rock we come to this another little rise here on the course, on the cowpath, and you can see to the left there is another trail that goes off which takes you to cemetery hill, now you are going to go that way today, but that’s where the Van Cortlandt family is buried. And it's also part of the 5 mile and 10K courses. So it's an historic part of Van Cortlandt lore. But we are not going to go that way today, so we are going to keep going on. At the end of the cowpath, you are going to come to this which is about an 85 meter hill, very sharp rise, and this is the only, on the Preston Forest it’s the only hill. Anyway you should be ready for this. It's a good steep elevation point and it’ll take you to the end of the cowpath.
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