Pre-Race
I had a bowl of cereal and a glass of gatorade for breakfast. I'll hold off on giving other details (e.g. my weight and body fat %), but may start providing that info in later posts (you'll have to subscribe or "follow" to see those posts).
Especially in the winter time, I think it's important to warm up enough. Race time weather was going to be about 35F, so I'd rather not spend the first mile of the race slowly warming up. Since the race start was 2 miles from home, I just walked/jogged over the river from Boston to Cambridge as my warm-up. After picking up my race bib number in the heated tent, I met up with a couple friends who planned to run at about the same pace.
After some final moments of warming up and stretching out, we hopped into the starting corral and the gun went off. Given this was a holiday time race, there were lots of costumes worn by runners: people dressed in santa hats, like elfs, with reindeer antlers, dressed as a Christmas present, etc. - pretty entertaining. I can't say I partook in any costuming, though I think amongst the 400+ runners, I was one of a small handful running in just shorts and a t-shirt - anything more than that and I may have overheated.
The Race
The course was flat and fast and the roads dry and relatively quiet for a Sunday morning (though it was not a closed course/there was still car traffic along Mass Ave.). Being relatively new back into road racing, I'm still working on my pacing, so I really didn't know what to expect in terms of pace/time. Also, I had looked at the race course on-line and knew where the turns were, but well.... (this gets reminiscent of a wrong turn on a hike this past summer). Apparently the race organizers didn't have one of the turns marked, and so the runners ahead of me missed it and took the next left turn - thereby adding a bit extra to the race distance. Naturally, the rest of us just followed the crowd and ended up running the extra distance as well. Oops!
So I had my GPS tracking application running on my phone so here are all the details (official and unofficial):
3.10 mi - 22:54 (7:20 min/mile) [official result for a 5k (measured a bit long at 3.24 mi)]
3.24 mi - 22:54 (7:04 min/mile) [GPS result of actual run, excess due to wrong turn]
My mile splits were successively: 7:16, 7:21, 6:46 - so clearly I could speed up a little at the start and middle of the race to not leave as much energy at the end. Like I said before, I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of time and pacing, so I was holding back a bit until I knew I could let it all out towards the end.
Post-Race
Good fun at the end. The giveaways were (randomly) either a fleece hat or a lump of coal, yes literally a lump of coal. I got the hat, but secretly wished I got the lump of coal - it looked kind of cool hanging around people's neck like a medallion. The post race party was nice, with some Smuttynose Ale on tap in the heated tent. Great small race, I'd run it again.
Pics
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| The start, I'm in back far off to the left... |
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| Moving up the field on the first turn (race # 154). |
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| Cruising along Mass Ave towards Harvard Sq. |
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| Crossing the finish line. |
