The 5k Madness Continues

Remember all of my talk about the Summer Championship Series?

Well I’m now officially 5/6ths of the way to completing the series! I ran 5ks the weekend of the Fourth and this past weekend with the Seashore Striders, and in two short weeks I’ll be done with my qualification for the series. I may have checked the series rankings at this week’s race, and I was pretty happy to see myself in the top 5 for my age group!

Beachpaper Firecracker 5k

The whole usual suspects group–me, Noel, Carlos, Eileen and Tony–came out for the Firecracker event on July 2. In my head the race was our official kickoff of the holiday weekend party, and it was really fun to have everyone join in the race. We were all festive with flags in our ponytails and made sure to do the Rocky pose when people shouted patriotic things to us. Although the group didn’t all run together, we all had a fantastic time.

I actually took it pretty easy during this race, since I knew I had more miles to run after the race was over. Carlos pulled ahead of me and set a new PR, which was awesome considering it was a warm morning. I finished in a respectable 27.30–faster than Jungle Jim’s but slower than my new PR at Bill Degan. I was super proud of myself for running another 5 miles back at the Broadkill Beach Club

Seashore Striders Classic

This past weekend I ran the Seashore Striders Classic. I was flying solo at this race (Noel was in PA at a family thing) and it was really odd to be all by myself after having racing buddies the previous two weekends. The Striders Classic is interesting, because it’s actually two races, a men’s race and a women’s race. The men went off first, and we women went out on the course to cheer them on. This was good and bad–good because I got to meet and chat with some of the other women who frequent these events and bad because my pre-race warmup was way too far in the past by the time we started, and because it was HOTTER THAN HOT by the time we started. It had rained really heavily the night before, and the air was so thick I felt like I could cut it with a knife. The humidity made this race really tough, although I found a couple of people that I stuck with which helped me pull through.

But I did learn something from this race–don’t go out too fast and never assume anything. My first mile was definitely too fast in this race, and when we got to that last mile in the full on sun I was feeling it. Secondly, see that girl in front of me in the picture from the race? Yeah, I thought she wasn’t in my age group. So I didn’t try to catch her. And as a result, I ended up not placing by 2 seconds. I’m taking this as a good reminder to never give up and always keep kicking.

Overall though, my time was pretty good–27.18–making it my second fastest 5k of the series so far. After finishing up at the race, I went to the local rails to trails trail and did another 6 miles. I felt like some kind of crazy running beast!

This next weekend is an off one, but I’m looking forward to finishing the series on July 23rd!

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