Turkey Trot

First and foremost, Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American friends, family, and readers :)

I'm in New Jersey again (like I have been for the past 3 Thanksgivings) and since doing a 5K here went so well last time, I decided to sign up for another race. Half of me wanted to do it since it was a good opportunity to get a final race of the season in, and the other half of me just needed SOMETHING to train for after surgery. I'm glad I did!

I PRed with a time of 28:11, beating my old time of 28:52!

The race course was relatively flat with a bit of a downhill in some parts (and no uphill, which was nice!) but lacked any sort of mile markers or timers so I felt like I was running the race a bit blind. My only way of really knowing how well I was doing was based off of my iPod. I created my playlist with a final time of 33:00 (I had stuck an extra "fast" song in there in case I wasn't feeling one of the other ones) and, after skipping a song, got onto my last song. I knew I had about 4 minutes if I wanted to run sub-30:00 (which was really my goal for this race because it was so close to my surgery). The final song came on as I turned the corner onto the street where the race started so I started pushing it as the song grew. I eventually broke out into a full-out sprint only to realize... "Wait a second, why are people running past the finish line? That IS the finish line, right? Right? Oh crap"... The end of the course wasn't where we first started out. In fact, I had maybe another 0.15 miles left. Not far, but far enough to make you feel like you want to die after you've given it your final push. A few people blew by me on their final push but me and this other guy ahead just did our best to finish as we'd both made the same mistake. As I crossed the finish line, a few other people made similar remarks. Hopefully next year they get that fixed (and add clocks/mile markers along the way while they're at it!).

I think I came in 4th in my age group. I'm not 100% sure what the age group WAS but there were enough people around my age ahead of me that even with various possibilities, I likely still didn't get a prize. Boo. But, with such a good time improvement, I know that I'll be able to maybe shave about a minute or two off by next year. It gives me something to work towards. Another big plus from this race was that I was (I think) running negative splits. My last 2 miles felt a lot faster than the first mile or so and I knew my legs were going pretty quick in the last stretch. I also passed a bunch of people so... either I was running faster, or they started out too fast. Either way, it felt good.

My boyfriend got a good picture of me nearing the finish line. I wasn't looking for them and at this point in the race, I was actually about to die. I pain shooting up all over my stomach and I was pretty much on the verge of collapsing, but I look semi-put together. I'm really glad that he and my sort of mother-in-law came out... they had to hang out in the cold while I was running on Thanksgiving morning... that's a big deal! Though, I did kind of want to punch him when I crossed the finish line after my not-so-big-finish (it was a big finish about 0.15 miles back where I THOUGHT the finish line was) and he said, "Well, you didn't win!". Thaaaanks Captain Obvious! Hopefully at this time next year, he's running with me (and we'll have run a few 5Ks by then together!).

Time for a nice diner breakfast, a nap, then Thanksgiving fun! Enjoy everyone! xox