K-town 5k: Racing 1/3 of My Commute Time for a Hat

Typically, I prefer for my blogs to read like an article. However, when circumstances call for it, I am more than willing to alter the game plan. That said, I had the pleasure of commuting 110 minutes for 23 minutes of misery at the Kinsman 5k yesterday. In short, here's the low down on my experience.

1. The drive was far more memorable than the actual race. En route, I shared the road with a very large tractor, a horse and buggy, a turkey, and a hearty variety of dead animals in various states of decay.

2. It was 85F on Thursday afternoon. By Saturday morning it was 31F and snowing chunks of Antarctic iceburg. With the afterthought of wind gusts, I should add. I suspect if I surveyed 100 runners, 97.5 would agree this amounts to a heap of misery.

3. I tried really hard to like the race, but the course was a boring ribbon of serpentine roads that wound around one endless cornfield it seemed, with hills-- the ugly, long, gradual incline type. I tried equally hard to want to run as fast as I could, but I think the miserable weather blew the fire behind me into the feet of the people running in front of me. There was no saving me. I was barely 15 seconds/mile faster than my pace at the 10 miler last weekend.

4. My reward for suffering this misery was a really ugly hat.

I should also note that there was a banquet table spread with more food than I've seen at my last three ultras combined. With a vast assortment of cream cheese frosted, cinnamon maple and chocolate chip muffins, cheese, veggie, and pepperoni pizza, bagels, cookies, oranges, bananas, and a lot more that I missed on the assembly line, I wanted to grab the megaphone from the race director and remind people that they only ran 3 miles.

I finished in 23:00 ( no, I apparently could not run even one second faster up the last hill). It was an utterly average finish time for me with an utterly average placement for me-- 5th overall female, 1st in the 30-34 age group. It was miserably cold. I was completely bored with the course. It is a race that will go down in the record book for the sole purpose of being almost comically uneventful. It did, however, set the stage for the taper that has commenced for my 24 hour trail race next weekend in Kirtland, Ohio. I'm looking to log some serious mileage there, and the weather forecast looks promising. Providing my body holds up, I'm hoping to get as close to 100 miles as possible.

I'd love to tell you a little more about my blissful experience in Kinsman, but I'm trying hard to push it into the back of the closet along with the ugly hat.

Cheers!