Not the weather I was expecting at all when I agreed to be a pacer for this race! The ice, oh my! Obviously the race directors had no control over the weather so I certainly do not fault them for that.

I'll start with the positives:
* They identified early (month out), they'd be too big for the original location and moved the event north to Montrose. Communication on this was excellent and I thought the shuttles from the original location (for locals) was a great call.
*The swag this group provides is always top notch. I love they steer away from the traditional tee. They generally give out a quality quarter zip long sleeve or jacket. This year you could choose from black or purple. I thought both looked great.
*I skipped the post race party to go get warm and recover, but the free pizza and beer is a nice perk.
*Under normal (weather) circumstances the course would have been great. Slight variations from a straight out and back which changes up the scenery.
*Since I was doing early miles, I got there about 90 minutes before race start so parking was a breeze for me. I did notice the back-up on the exit when I was running back to the race start. I would have been an anxious mess [note for the not so locals, go up an exit to Wilson. You'll skip the backup and probably end up parking just as close if you sat in the traffic].

Deltas:
*Pre-race day packet pick-up times were awful. Friday, the packet pick-up ended at 6:00pm. I thought that was a bit crazy and wouldn't be encouraging to runners to get it ahead of time. (please note you can pay $10 and have it mailed or pick-up day of. I thought I'd be able to easily get somewhere in the city to get my packet, so I didn't opt for the mailing and need had some extra miles so day-of wasn't for me either).
*I get it, in April you don't expect the course to be covered in ice. But there did not appear to be any efforts to mitigate the risk of injury by either the city or the race management. Almost the entire course was covered in ice. Also, there was no pre-race announcement warning runners about the race conditions.
*With the course in the conditions they were, I was surprised they still sent out pacers. I was fortunate I was pacing about 1:00/mile slower than I normally race. But I felt that having pacers encouraged bad behavior (people may still try to PR). It also left us pacers short a hand and unstable. I witnessed about 5 runners wipe-out....myself included.
*The start line was very disorganized. It was not clear where the start line was and apparently they intended to have some sort of wave start which was not clearly marked or easy to follow.

This group does a great job with smaller races, I've run several. This is the first time I've really had any type of complaints. I don't know if it was the size or just the unfortunate weather that threw them off their game. I'd still recommend their races to other runners and hope to see them get better with the "bigger" races.