Blue & Grey 5K Race Report

I was awake by 3:30 am, so excited and nervous about this race. I wonder if races will ever get old, or if I'll always look forward to them this much. Anyways, I took a peek at the hourly weather forecast and realized that we'd be running in TWENTY-FOUR degree weather. So much for running skirts.

We arrived at the race by 6:45 am, and guess what? It really was twenty-freakin-four degrees. We shivered and shook our way through chip pick-up, and ridiculously long port-o-potty lines. A family friend was supposed to be running in the 5K with me, but he was nowhere to be found.

At 7:30 am, hubs took off for his half-marathon, and I did a light warm-up for my race (7:45 am). The gun went off, and I went on my merry way. I like to place myself at the back of the pack at gun time. I'm certainly not fast enough to warrant a place at the front of the pack, and I love to start picking off the runners in front of me who start running WAY faster than they can sustain. At about the .50 mile mark we hit a pretty serious hill, but I danced my way up with no problem and fell in with other runners who were at my pace. I was nowhere near the turnaround point when the front runners started passing us on the way back to the finish. Don't you HATE those guys? You can always spot them before the race even starts. They're long and lanky and are wearing shorts and tanks in twenty-freakin-four degrees. I was maintaining a 10 minute mile pace pretty easily at the turnaround, but I could see that initial beast of a hill mocking me in the distance. The backside of it was a loooong downhill, which I knew meant a loooong uphill. I hit it at a 10:09 pace, and started losing time rapidly. About 3/4 of the way up, I'd dropped my running buddies, but I was spent and began walking. Within 30 seconds, "Eye of The Tiger" came on my iPod. Dammit. I'm pretty sure there's a LAW that prohibits walking while that song is on, so I got dat ass moving to the top of the hill. Once I'd reached the peak, it was a quick downhill and one last turn to the finish. I picked it up a notch and finished strong.

Goal time 32:00. Finish time 31:44, which is over 2 minutes faster than my last race.