10-miler

Race Day!

In April.  In Cleveland.  The weather is always a question.  Today was the Hermes Cleveland 10-Miler at Edgewater Park.  As any good racer will do, we watched the weather for today all week long.  Monday said: Rainy & 57, Wednesday: Rainy & 50, Thursday: Rainy & 45, Friday: Rainy & 40.  And it was 40 today...with just a spit of rain around mile 7 & a little bit of SNOW as we waited for Cheryl to finish.  But, dressing right made it a great race.  I felt good!  The heel/achilles thing felt FINE this morning. (Note to self: stretch daily...not just when something finally hurts.) and I beat my goal time, which I set at 1:30:00 ~ very doable ~ and I very did it! 1:21:29.  That's an 8:09 pace!  I'm really happy about that since I've been running 8:45 to 9:15 paces during training runs.

Anita and Kirsten met us at the start & Allison was at the turn.  It's always enjoyable to have people come and cheer you on.
I really liked this race for a number of reasons: 1. very laid back  2. not too crowded  3. very cool t-shirts  4. FLAT course with a downhill at mile 9 (so needed that)  5. it turns back on itself so you can see the leader (wow! was he fast) & you can watch the crowd for peeps you know.  Saw Mike coming at me and then realized how close I was to the turn-around.  He was shocked (and scared) at how close I was to him. {he finished in 1:17:03 ~ amazing} It was really motivating to see the people running faster than me & then seeing those I was ahead of 6. at the finish line the announcer called out, "Here comes Becky Barton from Madison" ~ How cool is that?!
This always happens and it always amazes me:  Today, around mile 3, I come upon a woman running like Phoebe (on Friends).  Seriously ~ she looked like she was trying to run all akimbo and awkward.  And I have to ask myself...how was she ahead of me?

Oh, and my funny story:  I was running along...around mile 6.  As I'm coming through an intersection {another reason I love to race...just going right through those red lights and all the cars waiting for us to pass...oh the power}I see a man and a woman talking on the street corner.  I see the man gesture toward me.  I'm kinda intrigued as to why he might me talking about me so I continue to watch him as he palm-up open-handed points at me as he's talking to the woman.  I watch and watch until they realize I see them talking about me, at which point I give 'em the double biceps...I don't know what they thought of it, but it made me laugh.

My results:  I placed 384th overall & 13th in my age group & ran incredibly consistently:  40:44 for the first 5 miles and 40:45 for the second 5 miles.