Memorial Day Dash

Yay! I finished my Memorial Day 5K Dash this morning. It started at 8 am down in Nashville. Even at 8 am, it was darn hot and humid. The course was a nifty but hilly one.

We ran around Greer Stadium (where the local baseball team plays), around Fort Negley (a Civil War era Fort built by the Northern Army while it occupied Nashville) and then through Nashville City Cemetary, the oldest exisiting public cemetery in the state. I even won a door prize....although there were no doors anywhere since we were outside. A friend of mine also won a door prize, a book about the history of the cemetery. She didn't want it so gave it to me, saving me $10 since I had planned to buy it.

I didn't beat my personal best record for 5K but I still had a good time and a 12:15 pace. The timers were all messed up, there was no mat to start the chips, the race clock was 90 seconds off the official time so I went by my watch time rather than the posted results.

I was thinking it was a fairly tough course, there was a lot of steep hills. I wrote it off as being me just not liking hills. I felt vindicated when I saw more experienced runners on the Nashville Striders page complaining about the tough course.

Two Weeks!

While at camp out a few weeks ago, I did something to my back. It was bad enough walking, there was no way that I was going to attempt to run.

Tonight was the first time I had attempted to run and so we decided to do an easy 5K.

As we started to run, I was a little discouraged because I felt like I was going so incredibly slow. I knew I would be slow since it had been so long since my last run.

Candi and Samantha pulled ahead and were about .10 mile ahead of me. I was so tempted to just stop because I felt like there was little point in going on when I was going so slow.

When I got to the stopping point, I was stunned to see my time 37:16! That is one of my fastest times doing 3.1 miles rather than my slowest.

I guess sometimes it does pay to take a break from running.

10K

Since we had done so well with running 4.5 miles, I decided to see if I could actually run 6.1 miles (10K)

There is a fairly good 10K run that my husband runs on a regular basis. I decided to run that this morning and my husband came along with me. He is recovering from pneumonia so my penguin waddle is not too difficult for him to do, even pushing the double jogging stroller.

Since I can run 5K in just under 40 minutes, I had a goal of doing the 10K in 1:20.

It was a gorgeous morning out and this course was sooo deceptive. I knew there were some hills but I was really looking forward to running DOWN them on the return. I swear, it was all uphill no matter which direction I was running. The really killer hill was in the last half mile...eeeek!!

I was pretty darn proud of the fact that I didn't walk, I continued to run and my final time was 1:23:44

Argh!

This will be the third time I have attempted to post this same thing! I hope it works this time!!

Tonight, we were up to 4.5 miles for our evening run, the longest run we have attempted.

We run on a loop of road that circles a school complex. From our starting point, each mile has a different point. The first mile is marked by the ROTC building, mile two is the baseball field gate etc. As we approached the second stop sign, I let Candi know that it was our stopping point.

We had been talking while running and it was a comfortable pace. Since we were so comfortable, I thought it was entirely possible that I was a lap ahead in my head so I veered back on course.

When I run, I start my stopwatch but then turn it back to the time. If I leave it on the stopwatch, I am too tempted to look at it, get freaky and think I should speed up.

I clicked over and saw we had been running nearly an hour. Now, we may be slow but we are not that slow..doing 3 miles in an hour. We had a good laugh about our willingness to run another lap.

Our time was 58:30 at a 13:00 pace. Woo hoo!