Weddings and Races

Sorry I've been kid of missing-in-action lately. Last week was full of festivities for the grand EVENT that was the Repic-Seifer wedding. I'm happy to say that everything went fantastically awesome and we had a blast.

Congrats Erin & Justin!

In other news, my gym is putting on this 5K Fridays thing, where for 8 weeks during the summer, you run a 5K every Friday at 6a.m. It's informal, not like a real race, just for "fun" (if you can call running 3.1 miles fun), they give prizes at the end for fastest, most improved, etc.

Last Friday was the first such race. I waited until after running my first 5K earlier this month before signing up for 5K Fridays, but since that race didn't totally suck, I decided to give it a try.

Thursday night I started to get a little panicky, like what if everyone else that signed up for 5K Fridays is like total marathon stars that run 15 minute 5Ks while simultaneously updating their Facebook status on their iPhones and making up their grocery lists for that afternoon.

Ben promised me it wouldn't be like that.

5:30 a.m. rolled around, and I made my way to the gym. All told, there was probably about 30-35 of us. Mostly females, with about 8-10 guys. I was relieved to see that there were some people signed up just to walk the 5K, so I was pretty sure I at least wouldn't cross the finish dead last.

As it turns out, I did okay. I did NOT beat my Sunburst time of 30:15 (they updated the race results since I originally posted them, I did 3 seconds better! Hooray!), but that was partly because I ran too far. They told us the course of the race, which was alongside the river (and quite pretty), and then told us that we turned around at Twyckenham, the halfway point, and make our way back.

Well, I roughly knew where Twyckenham was, but I'll be honest, I'm not all that terribly familiar with that part of town, particularly on foot.

So I was running, kind of in a zone, and knew I was fairly close to where we were to turn around at. A handful of runners had passed me going back the other way. I crossed under a bridge and was looking for a Twyckenham street sign. Nothing. I slowed, turned around, saw there was still people behind me. Kept running. Kept looking. Turned around again. Noticed there were people turning around at the bridge which was now about 75 yards behind me.

Ahhhhhh.....Twyckenham was the bridge.

So, I turned around, determined to catch up with those people who should rightfully have been behind me as they had been just minutes before, and were now in front of me by virtue of my idiotic geographic skills.

I'm happy to report that I did catch up with them, and beat them all across the finish line.

In fact, I was about the 9th person across, and the second female.

I don't want to get too braggy, after all, I am hardly a super-competitive runner, and will likely never be. And my goal wasn't to go out and beat a bunch of people, but rather to challenge myself and see some improvement. But this race gave me quite a boost in my self-confidence about 5Ks - I'm not just a goofy loser who tries to pretend she can run 3.1 miles.

I'm going to shoot for under 29 minutes by the end of this thing.

Wish me luck.