I’ve had a post in me since the weekend and am now able to unveil it, in all its posty glory. I ran a 5K race on Saturday, called “5K for a cause“, benefitting the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. The race was put on by Princeton High School, and the course wended its way through the lovely suburb of Glendale.

I had meant to post about that but was waiting until the results were online, which they now are (pdf). If you’re looking for me, I ended up in 30th place (out of 140 entrants), with a time of 25:39. Though according to multiple sources, the course was a little long (3.25 instead of 3.12), so at that pace, my actual 5K time was more like 24:40. Gooooo me. I was also intrigued to see that my plan of passing myself off as a 51 year old woman to score a free cake WOULD have worked (as there were no 51+ year old women running though a few walked).

So I think that things are going well for my upcoming triathlon, which is now in a little less than a month and a half.

So a bit about my experiences on race day. I got there pretty early. Packet pickup time was from 8-9:30, with race time at 10. I got there at about 9:00, picked up my packet and then…. well there wasn’t much to do. I wandered around Glendale (looking at the historical marker there!) for awhile. It had been suggested to me that I do a bit of pre-running for 1/2 mile or a mile or so, so I did that, but that still left me with a lot of time to kill. I really had to go to the bathroom, but there was nothing available. I overheard someone talk about there being one a mile or so up the road, so with nothing better to do, I headed up that way. I passed by the fire station and thought I’d take a shot there. The 2 firefighters there were very nice and after using the facilities I chatted with them for awhile.

Then it was GO time. We all lined up at the starting line. There were supposed to be 2 co-workers of mine at the race, but only one was there. He opted to line up a bit behind the front runners, whereas I lined up nearly right on the line. No way was I going to be cheated out of 2 seconds!!

He was somewhere behimd me for the first mile. He had warned me not to get too caught up in the adrenaline and try to sprint with the “rabbits” that would lead the pack, which is what I did. I kept a pretty good pace and was at 8:15 at the 1 mile marker. Somewhere around there was the first big hill – I believe it was on Magnolia Drive (course map here). I heard my co-worker give an audible groan and I never saw him again :-). He ended up about 2 minutes behind me.

As I mentioned, there were supposed to be 2 co-workers there. The other one nancied up. So I brought my race marker in and doctored it with a Scarlet N (for nancy). I scanned it in but unfortunately it’s in black and white

I’ve been doing some selling on eBay lately of these American Idol sponsored Coke / Edy’s ice cream coupons and there’s a rant in me brewing about eBay / Paypal, but it will have to be saved for another time…