12th Annual 5K Run With The Cops Kicks Off Friday Night; Training Data Suggests "Run" May Be Generous Term

WAUKESHA — The 12th annual 5K Run With The Cops steps off Friday evening from Veterans Park, a Waukesha Police Department fundraiser that has drawn a registered field of 287 runners, walkers, and what race organizers classify as "combination participants." What has not historically drawn much attention is how those 287 people are actually training for it, a gap in coverage that ended this week when a local fitness blogger began cross-referencing the race's public participant list against Strava.

Kyle Dunmore, who runs the running and cycling blog PaceWatch Waukesha out of his apartment on Sunset Drive, matched 61 of the 287 registrants to public Strava profiles by name and said the aggregated data was "not what I expected going in." Dunmore calculated an average training pace across those 61 profiles of roughly 34 minutes per mile, a figure that, applied evenly across the 3.1-mile course, would put the field's typical finish time somewhere north of an hour and forty-five minutes.

"I want to be careful here, because 34 minutes a mile includes stopping to check your phone, stopping to talk to a neighbor, stopping because a dog needs a break," Dunmore said. "But even accounting for all of that, this is not what I'd call race pace. This is more of a supervised outdoor walk with some running mixed in."

"Probably Fine"

Race organizer Ellen Trachte, a department civilian employee who has coordinated the event for six years, said she had not seen Dunmore's numbers before being asked about them Monday but was not especially alarmed. "Every year we have people who walk the whole thing, people who run the whole thing, and people who do some combination," Trachte said. "If the average pace is slower this year, that's probably fine. We have the course reserved until 8:30."

Trachte said the department does not track training data for registrants and had no plans to start. "We ask for a T-shirt size and an emergency contact," she said. "That's really the extent of what we need to know going in."

"Still faster than the traffic on 41."

— Ned England, Backslide Way

A Second Opinion, From A Lawn Chair

Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, whose YouTube channel Nedventuresout has documented neighborhood traffic and parking grievances to an audience of 420 subscribers, said he had independently clocked a Run With The Cops registrant training near Frame Park last Sunday using the same handheld radar gun he typically reserves for hospital-bound speeders on his own street. England said the runner, whom he did not name, posted a 31-minute-per-mile pace over roughly a quarter mile of the park's pedestrian path before stopping to rest on a bench.

"I wasn't out there for the race, I was out there for the Honda situation, which is separate and ongoing," England said. "But I had the gun with me, and when you have the gun with me, you use the gun." England said the 31-minute pace he recorded was, in his estimation, "still faster than the traffic on 41," a comparison he said he intended as a compliment.

Dunmore said his own Strava data, while imperfect, tracked reasonably close to England's single roadside reading. "One data point from a radar gun in a park isn't a study," Dunmore said. "But it's directionally consistent with what I found, which is that a meaningful chunk of this field is not currently capable of running a 5K in anything most people would call a normal time."

Friday Night

Trachte said the department's finish-line tent would remain staffed "as long as it takes," with volunteers on hand through at least 8:30 p.m. regardless of how the field's pace compares to prior years. Packet pickup begins at 5:30 p.m. at Veterans Park, with the race starting at 6:30 p.m.

Dunmore said he plans to attend Friday with a stopwatch of his own, positioned near the one-mile marker, to compare live splits against his pre-race projections. England said he did not plan to attend in an official capacity but had "not ruled it out," citing the possibility of "additional data collection opportunities" depending on how his Sunday goes.