Wednesday, 08 July 2009

• Race Report: Greatest Fourth in the North 5k

  Also know as the most unorganized event ever.

  This race is in my hometown over the biggest holiday weekend they have. It draws in probably 300+ runners. And it's not chip timed (really, my hometown is still in the 20th century, they're only 9 years behind the rest of us).

  That being said, I also extremely dislike this course. Arguably, it is a beautiful course that runs along the lake, through a residential area and in the country park. But it is a straight out and back course with quite a few small hills. And normally, the temperature is smoldering by the time 8:30am hits and the race begins.

  This year was the first year I didn't want to kill myself during the race! Hooray for that! The temperature was probably 15 degrees cooler than my last race, and I had just run a personal worst, so I knew anything I did in this race was going to be better. Oh, and Hubby ran it too! His second ever 5k!

  The race went pretty smoothly and one dumb kind resident even left a sprinkler on for us to run through. Running felt good. I wasn't sweating to death or overheating like last weekend, and just enjoyed myself and pushed hard.

  My "official time" was 23:59. How can this be, you ask, when my last race time was 33:35? How does one improve so much in just one week? Where can you get that training plan?

  Remember how I said this race was unorganized? And it wasn't chip timed? Well apparently their clocks run on time from a different universe too. Oh, and the volunteer who was tearing the bottom parts of the bibs off for scoring dropped all of the 5k tabs and didn't know what order they went in. Apparently someone had a good time putting them in their own order.

  My real time? 27:15. And I'm happy about it. That's still over 6 minutes faster than my worst time ever. Here's what the difference was: weather was approximately 15 degrees cooler, I actually ran during the week before the race, Hubby was there, and the hills were not nearly as bad.

  No pics from this race. Our camera is on the fritz right now, and with bar studying I just don't have the time to figure out what the heck is wrong with it. Oh, and we adopted a puppy over the weekend, and he's taking up some of my time too.

  

  Ripley

  More to come on this cutie later.

  THIS JUST IN: According to Athlinks.com, this race was a PR for me. Beating my 2006 time in the same race by 10 seconds. I'm not sure if it is an actual PR, but I'll take it!

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