UPDATE: May 9th (two months later) and the results are not posted for this race. You would think college students would be proficient at posting material to the web. There's a $100 award for breaking the course record. The organizer's should use the $100 and pay a student to enter the results on the web.
This past Sunday, the last of the annual three part Frozen Foot series 5K races was held at the Elizabethtown college. This race was held at 2:00 pm. The weather for this race was sunny and 50 degrees with a very slight wind.
I wanted to use this race as a test for how effective my training has been over the winter. I have to admit I was somewhat reluctant to run this race for fear of a poor performance. I have run about 200 miles of training since my last race. You want to believe there's a correlation between the quality of your training and the results you achieve in races.
This race was also going to be a barometer for my upcoming 10K race in Richmond, Virginia. The Ukrops Monument Avenue 10 K is only two weeks away. Will I have the stamina to turn in a sub 45 minute 10K?
It's a very short commute to Elizabethtown for me - about thirty minutes. I used my old Garmin automotive GPS to get me to the college. Unfortunately the GPS took me to one street south of where I needed to be. Normally this is not an issue, but I had arrived at 1:40pm for this race and only had twenty minutes to prepare for the start. I then parked about 300 yards away from the registration building in order to avoid driving around a parking lot several times searching for an open space.
After paying the walk up or late registration fee of $30 (w/out a shirt) I began my preparations for the race. I met my fellow Palmyra run-bud Jarrod Kulp at the starting line. Jarrod is a couple of years younger than I. I graduated high school with his older brother Robert.
As the race was to begin I was discussing the course layout with Jarrod when another gentleman named Nathan Putt also confirmed the course was a very fair one. I introduced Jarrod and I to Nathan after the race. I believe Jarrod and Nathan had played together in church sport leagues of some sort before. Turns out Nathan is a barn-burner who consistently turns in sub twenty minute five kilometer performances and is from the Middletown area.
There appeared to be nearly 500 hundred participants on hand at the starting line. I began to become slightly concerned about jockeying for position and/or being tripped in the course of the initial starting free-for-all. Fortunately, the concerns were not merited.
As it turns out, the race was on a very fair course, as advertised. There was a hill at the end of the first mile which resulted in myself changing to a more conservative race pace for fear of another hill - which I may or may not have been prepared to tackle. The only knock on this course would be their are a fair number of turns required to complete the course.
I finished this 5K race in a time of 22:39. I felt I had run a good race, i.e., I did not crash and burn at the end of the race. My mile splits were 7:08,7:37, and 7:11. I believe my training is yielding dividends from an endurance perspective - I could have run another 5K after the race, albeit at a slower speed. That would have be unheard of last year.
I noticed the race bibs for the series runners were the twenty nine cent, plain jane, number only format. In today's day and age of computerized graphics printing, there's no excuse for the el-cheapo race bibs. Many runners save their bibs and proudly display them at work or home. Race bibs in general are void of artistic merit- I am not sure why.
I believe I have a very good chance of breaking 45 minutes for the Ukrops Monument Ave 10K in two weeks. Hopefully the weather will be slightly warmer and my adrenaline rushing from the runners and crowds of over 50,000 people will propel myself to a new ten kilometer personal record.
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