This coincided with his surgery to remove all of the tissue that the cancer had affected, AND a run sponsored by one of my favorite blogs, http://www.theboringrunner.com called Freeze Your Thorns Off 5K. It was cool to run once and log two races!
Anyways, back to the run…
When I arrived at the run (Homewood High School in Homewood, AL) they had bananas and doughnuts for breakfast. I picked up my runner's packet. This was not an officially timed race, so we used bibs that were a tribute to a cancer fighter.
Before starting the race, a cancer survivor came out and spoke about running saying, "We runners are always talking about things we HAVE to do: log miles, time splits, run speed drills, and we forget how lucky we are. Today we are running not because we HAVE to, but because we GET to. We are lucky."
With that, we all started the race. I pushed the first mile and ran a little below 9:00/mi. This is quite fast for me since I train closer to 11:00/mi. I realized that I needed to pull back and did. Mile 2 was very soft and I took several walk breaks. Mile 2 was also very hilly and had a couple of road crossings. At the halfway point, we turned around. The water glasses were huge and I probably spent too much time drinking. (Amazing how after the race you start to look for seconds you could have saved).
The last mile I pushed very hard to try to come in sub-30. Well it was close, but not close enough!
I am so pleased with my time. I am going to haves hard time beating this, as I normally train at 34:00 on the treadmill. I need to start augmenting my tread runs with road runs ASAP. It's just so cold…
Anyways, until next time...
