verb
1. to want; desire; long for
2. to desire
Every year the Make A Wish Foundation grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. In order to do this, obviously the foundation needs to raise money. One of their annual events is the Run/Walk for Wishes. Running + A Cause = I'm IN. (The 10am start time didn't hurt either!) It's also been a while since I've run a 5k.
I got to the starting area around 9am and quickly met up with a friend and her family. My friend, her husband, her sister and her daughter (a Wish recipient) were planning to run the 5k race and the rest of the group was walking. We made our way to the very crowded starting line and with very little fanfare the gun went off.
Almost immediately I was caught in heavy traffic. Lots of people who wanted to be up front, but didn't have the speed to be there! Oh well, it's part of the experience and it kept me from committing my usual error of going out too fast. I also had to remind myself that I have a 10 mile run to do tomorrow and it wasn't going to do me any good to kill myself today and suffer for it tomorrow.
It took almost a mile to get a little day light, but my pace was really good (9:18 for the first mile). We came up to a water station, which was nice, but not totally necessary at that point. I took a couple of sips and dumped the rest down my back to cool off since it was pretty warm out today. I worked on getting back up to pace, but the course kind of looped back on itself around 1.5 miles, so there was a lot of traffic (walkers from farther back still heading to mile 1) to contend with. I made it to the Mile 2 water station in 9:27. I slowed to a walk, drank about half the water and dumped the rest over my head. Now it was Go Time. I knew that I could do better than 9:27 for the last mile. I kicked it up a little and started passing people. Mile 3 was finished in 9:21. That left a tenth of a mile to the finish line. I knew I had plenty of gas left in the tank so I put the pedal to the medal and finished that last 1/10 of a mile in 43 seconds.
I had intentionally avoided looking at my Garmin the entire race, but after I hit the Stop button I flipped it to show total time elapsed. 28:51...a new PR! I've been chasing a sub-30 minute 5k for a long time and today I finally got it!
I grabbed two waters from the aid table and started walking back along the course to see how my friend was doing. This was her first 5k! I spotted her and held out the water cup...which she chugged like a champ. And then I did something I never do after a race. I jumped back in and ran with her. Watching her take that final straight away made me happy for her...and I hope she's damn proud of herself!
After that, I headed home and promptly took a 3 hour nap!
The raw timing data for the race is up, but it doesn't seem right. It's claiming I finished in 29:00+ with an average per mile pace of 9:27. Obviously that's not possible since I have the Garmin data showing that my slowest mile was a 9:27! Hopefully all that will be ironed out soon. Meanwhile, I'm going to celebrate my new PR!
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