Go for the Gold 10k

Well, the race was better than I thought. I pretty much set myself up for disaster, so in the end 51:03 is not too shabby.

I'll start with pre-race Friday night. Chad and I go to a happy hour at 5:00 and I have a glass of wine and a pizza at Zax. When do I ever drink before a race? When do I lose all control and eat an entire pizza? Granted, it was really thin crust, but you'd think I would not want to haul an entire Margherita pizza around the next morning. After dinner we walk around the new shopping area, 'The Domain', and are on our feet for a couple more hours...probably not the best pre-race activity. We need to kill time waiting on my niece to be born. I also make a dumb decision to drink a Frappuccino at about 9:00, so that is not going to be good for sleeping.

At about 9:00pm we get the call that my sister-in-law is 'ready to push', so we head over to the North Austin Medical Center to take our places in the waiting room. She is born at 9:30 and we get to go in and see her close to 10pm. Isn't she cute?

We stay the night at Chad's house. It is about 11:30 before the coffee lets me get some rest. I am dreaming about a nasty odor and I wake about 3am to find that a skunk sprayed right outside of the house. The smell is nauseating. We do what we can to make the bedroom smell fresh and get the air to circulate, but it does not help me sleeping the rest of the night.

6:15am - Wake up and find that I did not pack my sports bra. UGHHH! We hustle and drive 25 minutes to my house to get one. 7:10 am - We leave to go to the race. 7:25 am - I realize I do not have my personal chip. UGHHH! I manage to get a chip to use for the race with the nice folks at chip pickup. We try to warm-up and get about 1/2 of a mile in. I am just not feeling it this morning.

Once the race starts, I try to fall into a good pace. I run without a watch on purpose this morning to just go on how I feel. It turns out to be a good strategy for me. I think I was pretty even-paced throughout the whole race. I know that my first mile was about 8:00-8:10. Overall, my finish pace was 8:13/mile. Not bad.

Go for the Gold 10k is a tough one if you are in the training/weight situation I am in. There were rolling hills and an uphill finish. I am proud of how I did today. Thank goodness the next race will not involve babies, alcohol, coffee, skunk, missing clothes and a missing chip. I will be more prepared, but I still may not wear my watch.

Until my next run...