And before you know it, it’s a new month! Greetings all, it has been awhile but that is mostly due to some very productive birding outings with my brother and the official opening of the 2015 race season. I would be underestimating the blog fodder to say I’m covered for birding posts for the rest of the year thanks to those outings. Since I ended April with a bird themed post, let’s go with the race season to start off the month of May. April 23 was the beginning of the Illinois Marathon festivities. It started with an evening 5K run to get the kinks worked out and the muscles warmed up.
Unfortunately, the weather really wasn’t cooperating with us that weekend with a heavy dose of rain scheduled for that Friday as well as the rest of the weekend. Figures the wet stuff would come down after a string of nice days leading up to it. Oh well, that’s how the weather gods treat us runners. We pretty much lucked out for that 5K. It was nice and cool and besides being overcast, the rain basically stayed away until after we had finished. Oh, forgot to mention there was a “we” this year. My running buddy Sung signed up for the festivities as well. It is ALWAYS funner when you can run with someone especially someone that you have been training with through the cold snowy days of Winter. Here we are before the start of the 5K – relaxed and focused on not getting hurt during this short 5K run. I can’t remember the last time I entered a race under 7 miles – general rule, if it takes longer to take a shower than run, might as well just take a shower. However, this was a special 5K and trust me, worth skipping the shower .. at least until after the race.
One of the cool things about this race is it ended up on the 50 yard line of Memorial Stadium. Even after going to the U of I for four years, this is the first time I’ve ever been on that field. We started together in the first corral thanks to Sung having a small math mix up. The first corral was meant for 27 minutes and under. That fit well within my expected time and easily in the expected time for Sung. Only problem was, he did the conversion from kilometers to mileage incorrectly – simply halved it so 27 minutes for 2.5 miles … oops, 3.1 miles. I think he was a little concerned about his start position after I reminded him how far it really was – NO WORRIES. We carried an 8:34 pace through the course – congrats to Sung for owning that course. Granted, there were a couple of incentives during the race – like the rabbit in the orange shirt with the number 5 on it and the frequent course crossers in very attractive dresses and high heels. Guessing there were sorority activities going on which we both agree should be made a requirement for all future races!
Final numbers – 26:39 42 for 45-49, 544 for males and 741st overall. All this fun and they even gave us a medal for completing the short run. Here we are for the official post race shot – happy faces and most important no injuries.
Hit the jump to see what the race weekend really had in store for us!
