Freaky 5K Race Report

Not going to lie. I didn’t want to run this. I’m blaming it on the funk I’ve been going through the past few weeks. I just don’t want to run. But that’s another post for another time.

So the 5K. I didn’t want to run. But I got myself out of bed early Saturday morning. And boy, it would have been nice to stay in bed since it was cold outside. Like 27 degrees and sunny. Thankfully there was no wind.

I left the house too early, which meant I had almost an hour to stand around at the park waiting for the race to begin. In other words, almost an hour to freeze. But finally it was race time.

This course is fairly flat. Except for the first mile. Where there’s a nice downhill right out of the starting line. Which would be great, except this race draws a ton of little kids. And as hard as you try to place yourself within the starting masses, you still end up having to weave or come to an abrupt halt in order to avoid running over the little boy dressed as Spiderman on that downhill. Thankfully, this year that didn’t happen to me. I had a pretty clear path all the way down the downhill.  And of course, what goes down must go up. And that uphill was nasty. But I ran it.

And that, my friends, is when my IT band started to get angry. I’m not sure if it was the cold or if it was the hills, but it wasn’t happy. So I backed off, slowed down and didn’t hate myself for taking those two short walk breaks (once at the top of the hill, once through the water station). And with every step I was wishing I was done.

I ended up finishing in 32:25. Not my fastest 5K, not my slowest. Given the cranky IT band, my lack of running mojo lately and the fact that for a while somewhere between miles 1 and 2 I couldn’t feel my foot due to the cold, I’ll take it.

You'll notice a lack of photos in this race report. They exist. They really do. I just didn't grab them off my Mom's camera, so I'll add them later.