The WaldoWaldo 5K

Mission accomplished!  Completed my first 5K yesterday.  Ran a little bit, but mostly walked.  It was a slow start because of the bottleneck of people, but eventually it all evened out and we were able to go at our own pace.  But, I'm getting ahead of myself a bit...

Night before:
Even though I didn't plan on running the whole thing, I still wanted to be prepared in case I needed something afterwards.  I packed some homemade trail mix, cereal fruit bars, fresh orange slices, water and Gatorade.

Photo op - me and my bestest race bud "J"

Day of:
We grabbed breakfast on the way and arrived early to find parking.  It was free, a couple blocks away, but free - yay!  We walked to the park and followed the directions of lots of volunteers to the registration area and got our bibs.

It wasn't too long before we gathered in the center of the park for the world record attempt photo.  And no, we didn't make the record books this year - missed it by that much (about 1000 shy), but it sure was fun trying!

Yep, I'm in there. Got the "barrier" under my arm while waving and sunglasses on.
Between the Waldo in gray pants on the phone and the lady in jeans and pink shirt.
See me?

Then finally, the countdown started and we were off!  It took some time to reach the start line.  The bottleneck of people, some walking and some running, stayed pretty tight until about a half mile in.  I did't realize that the trail wouldn't be concrete the whole time and ended up getting tiny pebbles in my shoes - not fun for walking or running.  Three times I had stop and dump them out of my shoes.

We removed our hats at this point because it was getting a bit toasty!

Finally, I wised up and tied my shoes a bit tighter in the hopes of keeping out the unwanted little buggers.  It worked, but each stop would've killed time if this had been a timed event.  Guess it's good I learn these things now.

Here's the entire route.

Anyway, to make up time, I decided to run across all the bridges - I think there were three bridges - and we crossed one of them twice.  I'm guessing the bridges are 50ft long?  Anyway, it seemed to work - we did the first mile, with bottleneck and rocky-shoe problems, at 17:35.  The next mile was 16:03 (w/the final rocky-shoe problem) and for the final mile, we made it in 14:39.  Then for the final .28 miles, we ran across the last bridge and a few hundred yards later, we sprinted to the finish line - woo hoooooooo!

This was a lot of fun.  All the people were super nice and the volunteers were awesome.  I can't wait for the next event!  I'll cover what that's going to be in a future post.

'Nite all and have a great week!!