St. Joe's 5K Race Report

If your name doesn't appear in the official results, does that mean you really didn't run a race? Even if you swear you were there? And have photographic evidence?

Because if it does, that means I didn't run the St. Joe's 5K on Saturday. But I did. You just can't find my name in the results anywhere. And it would have been nice to see my name and time in the results since I turned in a new PR.

But I'm ahead of myself.

So Saturday was the St. Joe's 5K, the race that had the Portsmouth start. I got to the race sit early, like almost an hour and a half before the runners would start. My dad was walking the 5K and the walkers took off a half hour before the runners. So I was early.

I made use of the time though. There were two visits to the port-a-potty, I snapped some pictures of my dad starting the walk. I did a tiny bit of stretching. And then I watched the 20-some waves before me go off.

Finally they called Wave 34 and it was my turn to run.

The course was an out-and-back that wound through a neighborhood before heading out on to the converted railroad trestle. After you got across the lake, you turned around and headed back to the starting area. There wasn't anything too exciting. Thanks to the staggered start, there weren't massive crowds of people. Which there wouldn't have been anyway since I think maybe 300 people were running. It did get a bit crowded once we were on the trestle. They had the trestle divided, but some of the back of the pack walkers decided to walk more than 2 abreast. Add that to runners coming back off the trestle and it got crowded. It was kind of hard to pass anyone, much less keep a steady pace at those points.

Oh and it was pretty windy.

I hit the turnaround and started back. One thing to note, there was no water station on the course at all. Not sure what was going on there. I wasn't dying of thirst or anything, but it would have been nice to have a sip or two of water at the halfway point. Just sayin'.

For about 2.2 seconds I debated with taking a short walk break once I hit land and was in the final mile. But I opted not to. And I'm glad I didn't. Once I rounded the final corner and the finish line was in sight, I kicked it into high gear, passed a few folks and booked it to the finish line.

I hit stop on my Garmin as I entered the finisher's chute. A volunteer took my tag from my bib and I got a barely filled glass of water before glancing down at Garmin Gus.

31:15

That folks is a new PR. I shaved 10 seconds off my previous PR which I set back in May at the Sole Burner 5K. Of course looking through the results the next day I was a bit disappointed when I couldn't find my name. Makes me wonder what the heck happened since the volunteer woman took the tag with my identification off my bib.

EDIT: While grabbing a link for the race website for this post, I checked the results one more time. My name was there this time, but I swear it wasn't there on Sunday when I looked.  And according to the "official" results, I finished in 31:17. It's still a PR though. A PR of the 8-second variety. I'll take it.

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Of course even though I managed to PR, my running wasn't done for the day. I still had to tack on an additional 5 miles in order to get the 8 miles in that my half marathon training plan called for. Originally I was just planning on doing it once I got back to my parents' house. But the door prize drawing at the race took WAY too long. So what did I do?

On the way home I had my mom drop me off at an intersection and I ran the rest of the way home. I thought the intersection was 5 miles from their house, but turns out I was about a mile short, so I had to add in some extra loops.


 Not as speedy as the 5K from the morning, but I finished up 5.1 miles in 57 minutes. With 8.2 miles in the books, I was then able to enjoy a brief stop at a classic car show, a Halloween party for The Rugrats and, oh yeah, watching the Badgers beat up on Ohio State. I'd say that was a pretty good day.