Our first official race is over and it was an interesting experience. It was fun for the most part. There were a couple frustrating things but all in all it was a good experience.
This was a valentines themed race so you had all sorts of people wearing all sorts of different valentines themed outfits. I think the best one was the couple, him in a nice suit and her in a nice dress, that had rigged up a table with dishes and champagne flutes and somehow hooked this on to the front of them. It looked like they were having a fancy dinner while they were running the race. When the pictures get posted I'll see if I can put up a link. I imagine it wasn't easy to run in but it looked cool.
There were upwards of 2500 people that turned out for the race. At the start they try to get everyone to get into groups based on your average pace per mile. This is great in theory as long as the people in front of you actually know what their pace is and don't have it in their mind that they are considerably faster then they really are. We lined up in the right spot for our pace and thought this is would work out just fine. As it turns out when the gun when off we thought we were going to start and then started to shuffle forward but the mass wasn't really moving. So we jumped out of the pack and waited to go at the end. Nate managed to somehow get himself into a position where he was able to move out pretty well and so did Jerry W who started with us but was able to get ahead too. So we finally got back in at the end of the pack and started the zig zag and running around process to get us moving past the walkers and slower runners. The most frustrating part was coming up behind the three women with the jogging strollers walking three abreast on the trail and leaving about 3 feet for the pack behind them to pass on their left. That was annoying because they were oblivious to the fact that they were blocking the trail for everyone else.
Once we got off the Green Lake trail and onto the streets the race took on a better flow and people could move at a pace they were comfortable with and not spend too much time dodging other participants. We pretty much ran a normal pace for us. We thought we were going slower but at the end when we got our official times we found that we were on our average pace. Of course Nate beat us pretty handily and unofficially Lisa and I tied as we crossed at the same time but somehow they placed me at 1922 and her at 1924. There was nobody in between us so I'm not sure how that works....
The gun time below is higher because it actually reflects the time we jumped out of line to wait for space. The time is the actual chip time from when we cross the starting line and registered our RFID to the time we crossed the finish line and recorded the end of the race. Jerry came in about a minute ahead of us.
Bib NO. OVERALL GUN_TIME TIME PACE
674 Nathan 1530 36:00 33:52 10:56
672 Bradley 1922 42:25 38:41 12:29
673 Elisabeth 1924 42:25 38:42 12:29
All in all it was a fun event. The gathering ahead of time was very festive, crowded but everyone was having a good time.
Now we keep training and increasing our mileage while I'm on the hunt for the 10K we want to do in late March or early April.
Onward!
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