Ran a race today :)

My running group has been talking about the Sound to Narrows 12k and promising that it was LOADS of fun and I should run it.
So I registered Jason and I on Friday and turned up at the start this morning!

The t-shirts are...o.k. Not great but not as ugly as some I've seen so I was mollified :)

The race started at 8:45am in waves depending on what your projected pace time which is kind of late for race start times so I was kind of worried of turning up at the wrong time. This morning I was waking up every 30 minutes starting at 5am checking my clock to make sure I didn't over sleep- which I didn't. Jason wanted to stay in bed and tried to bribe me with breakfast in bed but I rebuffed him.
Plus I didn't really feel like French Toast. :)

The runners in Club Oly assured me that they were registered for the 7:30 pace team even though they had no plans on actually running at that pace and told me to register in the same group...which I did.

While I broke my record of not ever needing to use the race porta potties (I KNEW I shouldn't have mentioned it last week!) Jason found the group fro Club Oly but afterwards I never did find them.

So I ran alone...poor me...

It was a nice run though and the weather was FANTASTIC!!! Most of the course was shaded and the volunteers at the water stations were great. There wasn't much of a spectator presence but the ones that did come out were fun and several people got out the garden hoses and sprayed us down to help keep us cool. That was really nice towards the end of the run.

Everybody had made a huge deal about the hills in this race but to be honest they weren't anything I haven't run in Charlotte...although sticking two reasonably steep hills in the last mile was a kind of mean. They even had a photographer set up just as you turned the corner and saw the hill. I'm sure he captured plenty of expressions of despair as the runners caught sight of that last hill looming ahead of them.

For the second time in my racing "career" I decided to sprint the pipeline. The first time was at the Hit the Brixx 10K 2005 where I beat Dad (on his birthday) by a fraction of a second. There was a girl who looked like she could have been in my age group and I figured if I beat her I would move up a spot on the race standings...I was going strong and then some guy ahead of me slowed down and blocked my path making me break stride and letting her blast past.

Poo. Oh, well.

My finish time was 1:03:50 which made my average pace 8:34 per mile. I'm pretty happy with that since I didn't really go into the race with a particular goal and only kind of thought it would be cool if I could maintain a 8:26 per mile pace since that is the average time I need to qualify for Boston.