Wrap Up & Run 10K Race Recap

I honestly wasn't even going to do this race. I was going to concentrate on PRing in the Eastleigh 10K (which is next weekend) because literally 100 people from my running club are doing it and didn't know if I'd be up for racing 2 weekends in a row.

But oops! I found myself signing up for it because it was super close to my house and I felt like I should take advantage of that. I mean, America finds a race for everything. I kinda miss that.

I wore green even though it wasn't St. Paddy's Day themed! Oh well! #TeamSparkle

The course was about 2.5 laps of the park that I know like the back of my hand. This kind of worked to both my advantage and disadvantage.

My slowest points were definitely when I thought "Ugh crap... I still have to run this exact spot 2 more times..."

And then to top it off, they had signs for every kilometer. So as we passed the 1K marker, we passed the 5K marker about 4 seconds later. That was a bit soul crushing. Stupid laps.

Oh and did I mention it rained poured the entire time?? I know, I'm really painting a fantastic picture of how lovely this race was.... But it down-poured. And it was kind of nice for like a minute. And then rain got in my eyes and my contacts starting cursing at me and that sucked.

Other than that, it was a great race! It wasn't very big, therefore, no big crowds or need for weaving.

Thumbs-upping to Alex, who was a lovely sport and stood in the rain! It looks like I'm going super fast because I'm a blur in the picture. In reality I'm probably like "It's raining, it's cold, and we're at .3 miles right now...."

My last 10K was back in December 2011. So going into this race on Sunday, I knew I had a PR in me somewhere.

I had no idea I had a 10 minute PR in me, though! My official time was 1:03:38!

I stayed pretty positive throughout the race. Even though I didn't train much (read: AT ALL) for this race, I knew how far I had come and felt proud to be a runner.

The worst parts, like I said before, were the parts when I realized how much was left simply by knowing how many laps we had completed. Those were my 2 mental blocks. Anything in between was more like "Yay! Running! This is fun! I'm flying!" 

I sprinted through the finish and was beaming when I looked down at my Garmin and saw 1 hour and 3 minutes staring back at me. It was a good feeling.

What wasn't a good feeling was walking through the mud as shooting pains were going through my knee. Ouch, that was no fun....

But then we went home and made green drinks in honor of St. Patrick's Day.  

Green cider... Why the hell not!

In my lovely college town, they always had green beer for the weekend. But I hate beer. So I never really celebrated St. Patrick's Day. So when Alex said the pubs were making green beer/cider for the first time (that he'd seen), I knew I had to celebrate my PR in style!

Hope you had loads to celebrate this weekend! Do anything fun for St. Patrick's Day?? Race? PR? Pretend to be Irish?