Hartfest Half is insane - and may be just what the land of the 5K needs

Yet another turn, in a race full of them.

Let's get right to the heart of the matter: The Hartfest Half course is completely bonkers. And the two railroad crossings aren't even the crazy part.

What starts on a nice paved pathway progresses through sidewalk, dirt path, parking lot, gravel, roadway, puddles, mud, more gravel and on in maddening variations of that sequence.

Technically, this is an out-and-back course, but that description would prepare no one for what lies ahead. Nothing is predictable. Straightaways lead to sharp turns that, at first, seem to point the runners toward simple loops. But those loops develop into even more complex loop systems that serve to completely disorient the first-timer, with U-turns, sudden ups, perilous downs, the occasional fork in the trail and extended stretches of two-way runner traffic.

I signed up to navigate this chaos on June 23 and am happy to say I survived. It was like no other race I've run. And in spite of the insanely complicated course — or perhaps because of it — it ended up as a rather fulfilling 13.1 miles by the time we brave runners finally felt relief at the sight of that finish line on the Oak Leaf Trail in Wauwatosa's Hart Park.

To give credit where credit is due, the Hartfest course is a rather miraculous feat of course engineering. It's like something Willy Wonka might have cooked up if he had been interested in Saucony instead of candy.

How is this even possible?

The challenge here is the location. Fitting 13.1 miles into the narrow strip of parkland from Hart Park to Hansen Park (the golf course) is not easy. That's why this area typically is known for its 5Ks. Space is so constrained that most 5Ks still gravitate toward an out-and-back route, or they loop around the neighborhood south of Honey Creek Parkway, seriously pissing off some of the neighbors there. The results are a seemingly endless string of solid but not particularly interesting races, typically supporting this or that charity.

Nothing wrong with that. I'm a happy, two-time finisher in the Get Your Rear in Gear that starts and ends in Hart Park. And one prominent exception to the 5K rule, the Lucky Leprechaun, crams in a 7K (4.3 miles) and pulls it off pretty well every St. Patrick's Day.

But even the Lucky Leprechaun race highlights one of the first obstacles facing a race designer here: Those train tracks.

Lucky Leprechaun starts right at the tracks, so the course's single crossing happens at a convenient Mile 0.1. Even so, last year's Lucky Leprechaun was delayed by about 5 minutes when a train passed by almost precisely at race time. Luckily, race organizers and Wauwatosa police have a general sense when a train will ruin a race start, even if they only have the haziest idea when a train will pass again the longer a race goes.

Nature served up a beautiful morning for this year's Hartfest Half, staged by the Badgerland Striders, but the Candian Pacific railroad had plans of its own. Race director Pete Abraham, also the Striders' president, announced that the 8:30 a.m. start would be delayed to let a train pass. Five minutes led to 10 before the train finally came, resulting in a race delay of 15 minutes.

The tracks come about two-thirds mile into the Hartfest race. No big deal for the first crossing, but everyone is worried about what will happen if a train interrupts the return trip, in the middle of Mile 12. I devilishly was kind of hoping to find out, pure curiosity, though I know that would have been a big bummer for most of my fellow runners.

At any rate, when the racers got the go-ahead, all thoughts turned to race strategy, whether to go out fast and see how I felt or to play it safe. I never make the right decision in these moments. I often end up choosing both: I plan to play it safe and then end up going out fast anyway.

I hit those first two miles at a brisk 7-minute pace, and no surprise there. The Oak Leaf Trail along the Menomonee River Parkway is my go-to route for mid-week tempo runs. It's straight and mostly flat. But then the Hartfest Half started to get screwy.

We turned into Hoyt Park, ran past TOSA Pool and then ... into the woods? Here was the loop to set the tone for the loops to come. We eventually ended up back in the Hoyt Park parking lot before making our way up the hill to the Underwood retention ponds. Then things got really weird. I've run this figure-eight-shaped dirt-and-gravel path around the retention ponds many times without thinking much about where I was going. But running Hartfest Half demands your full attention.

We took a sharp left where I would normally have taken a gradual right. The course volunteer pointed us to another sharp left, so we could run a quarter mile out-and-back on a dead end road for no other reason than to get in that extra quarter mile. [UPDATE: Pete Abraham tells me the brief out-and-back indeed was tacked on at the last minute to make up for the loss of a quarter mile in Hart Park because police didn't close 70th Street as was hoped.] 

Then off the road and down a short, steep dirt path that kicked us back into the woods. The temperature had risen from a comfortable mid-60s into the lower 70s, and the shady woods were even worse than the open sun because of the humidity. After four miles I was starting to lose steam, feeling the heat and increasingly confused as to where we were heading next.

I've been researching USATF course measurement rules this year in preparation for measuring the course for TosaFest 5K on Sept. 8, so when I race now, my thoughts often drift toward analysis of courses, thinking about the shortest possible route, a foundational standard, as well as the need to station course marshals at confusing turns and plant cones at places where runners need to stick to a line.

The Badgerland Striders literally have a warehouse full of orange cones for use at their races, and it was conceivable that all of them were out on the Hartfest course this Saturday. The Striders have been doing this nearly forever, so I generally trust their courses are on point. But ... I started to have my doubts. Or I at least was doubting my ability to follow their admittedly thorough directional cues.

Did I cut that turnaround short by running between cones instead around all the cones?

Should I be running on the sidewalk or edge of the parking lot, and would it matter?

If I took a shortcut and skipped one of those wacky loops, would anyone even notice?

OK, so I didn't skip any loops, at least not intentionally, but at a fork in the path on the west end of the retention ponds, I was about to take the right path, which is how I normally would run this route, when a voiced shouted to me, "HEY!"

A tall man in a yellow race shirt sprinted by to my left, drawing attention to my error and putting me back on the correct path behind him.

I thanked the man, who introduced himself as Paul, and he and I chatted a bit as we spun through yet another dizzying loop around the community garden at the top of the hill. It was reassuring to have company through the rest of this maze of a course, and he and I seemed to have settled in at about the same pace, a hair faster than 8-minute miles. I'm not sure I would have had the motivation to push myself for the rest of the race without someone else to shadow, so if my pace was holding Paul back, I'm grateful that he let me hang with him as we made it back to Tosa Village. No train to slow us down as we crossed the finish line.

Say what you will about Hartfest Half, you can't deny the Striders keep this one interesting. Some runners might find a course like this infuriating, and in a certain mood I might agree with them. But on this day, it seemed like a fun romp. Anyone concerned about course accuracy might be advised to look for every arrow and run at your own risk (of getting lost).

And if you accidentally end up in Brookfield, just catch the train back.