Racing for Recovery 10K 2020

It’s October, and finally the first live race of 2020 for me! We all know 2020 has been a different kind of year. In our area we returned to live racing back in September, but I didn’t feel motivated, or had the time, to run any races until now. When I saw my daughter’s cross country meet wasn’t going to happen until the late afternoon, I hopped on the chance to dust off my Kinvaras and hit the race course!

This race supports Racing for Recovery which is a center created by a guy who struggled with addiction (drugs and alcohol) and turned his life around through healthy choices and racing. It’s a really great story and quite impressive. You can read about Todd HERE. He’s an inspiration for all of us.

We had been having warm weather all week long (75 for a high and 50s in the morning!) but sure enough on race day it was 39 degrees! Brrrr! It’s that time of the year that I don’t really know how to dress for quite yet, so I layered up two shirts for the race. Luckily I did a warm up mile and found out I would be very unhappy with two layers and stripped one off at my car.

As for the COVID-19 safety procedures, the following changes were made:

• Wear a mask and practice social distancing at all times, other than while running. Even in the corrals.
• Wave start to limit number of runners waiting together for the start.
• Put a mask on after finishing the race.
• Only one water stop, with bottled water.
• Finisher medals were given with race packet. No medals were handed out when you crossed the finish line.

The race was split into waves for each event (5K & 10K). I was in wave 1 of the 10K. It was still dark out, so I wandered into the corrals near some people who looked “fast”, ie, they were on the Dave’s Running race team and had on singlets and shorts! I then started chatting with a friend next to me and learned that she was in wave 3 (!!). At the same time I heard the announcer counting down “3-2-1!” so I busted a move with the other guys and we hit the start line at the very end of wave 1. Phew, we just made it!!

I decided I wasn’t going to look at my watch. What was the point? I’m running the best I can. I did glance at it when the mile splits happened and I saw I was running far too fast – mile 1, 8:14. Oh well, let’s see how it goes!

What I wasn’t prepared for was the hills on this course! The course was 2 loops and there were 3 big hills. Yikes! But the course went through an amazing residential area with huge houses and looking at them kept my mind occupied. There were also bands playing music which was cool.

I won’t say this course was easy for me, but I kept at it and just said No to that little voice that just wanted to stop and walk up those hills! 🙂

My finish time was 52:27, 8:27 pace. Technically my Garmin said 8:33 pace because I had 6.15 miles. I predicted 8:30 would be my pace, so it was spot on! And great news, that scored me 3rd place in my age group out of 17. Woohoo! We had to wait for awards and I was shivering like crazy (oops, why didn’t I bring along a coat??), but it was worth it.

The age group awards were designed as gold records, to follow along with the rock and roll theme.

Sadly, my high hamstring tendinopathy was kicked into high gear after this race. Speed and hills are a major irritant to this condition, so of course there was going to be some pain. whomp, whomp. Even still, it was a good race which I highly recommend if you ever get the chance to run it! Fun to be out racing in person!

I’m linking this with Kim and Zenaida for the Tuesday Topics Link-Up