Race Day Recap

Another race day. Another less-than-spectacular finish.

To start with, Saturday morning was very foggy. (See previous post about rain.) And humid. And muddy. Well, that was just on the ground. I jogged around a parking lot by way of warmup, and my hair and glasses were covered in mist from that 2-3 minutes of running.

I was silly and wore my glasses anyway, and before I got to mile 1 I had 1) already wiped them off three times, 2) run out of dry places on my shirt to wipe them ('cause to clean off glasses, the cloth has to be bone-dry). So I perched them on top of my head for the remainder of the race, which meant between the fog and my nearsightedness, I really couldn't see.

Only two things of note happened during the race-- one of the fields along the course was flooded, and as the sun peeked through the fog, it looked like I was running next to a lake, which was kind of nice. The other was that aid station workers were discussing whether or not Chad was going to make it through the race, thus throwing me into a state of momentary panic. (The woman asked, "He said his heart rate was 240-- does that sound normal to you?" I said, "NO!" thinking to myself, Does a 240 heart rate sound normal to you? When I checked with Chad later, we figured out that his math was off, and his heart was not beating that hard.)

So I got to the end of the race, and a woman from my office was standing by the side of the road, screaming my name. She had come to see her son run the 2-mile race, then stuck around for an additional 45 minutes to see me finish. I couldn't believe it. I owe her some cookies. A couple of friends from church had also come to see their children, so they cheered us in as well. It really makes a difference to have a fan in the crowd.

I was outside my goal time by two minutes, thirty seconds. No prizes for guessing how bummed I was about that. Our friends who are members of the running club assured me that everyone had lower times because of the fog and humidity-- apparently, not being able to see the goal causes a general slowdown. There's a life lesson in there somewhere.