Saturday, April 26, 2008

Race report #2

Architecture for Humanity 5K
30:52

Way too early this morning the stove caught my favorite (okay, only) coffeepot on fire. The gas flames got too big for their britches and had an unfortunate meeting with the one plastic part on the thing, and now my stove is covered in melted plastic, the kitchen smells like crap, and I am down one coffeepot. The coffee came out fine, but when your favorite coffeepot has just caught on fire, there's nothing that can't be made better with some strategic cursing and a liberal splash of whiskey. So, at around 8am, I set off slightly intoxicated and pissed off to my second 5k race of the year/my life.
Long story short, when I finished the race I was no longer either of those things, so yay running!
This was an awesome race around the Charles River out by Harvard/Allston. The weather was perfect, sunny and breezy, and the course was almost all flat. I actually passed ten people (I counted), and though I only beat my previous time by a minute and am still running at around 10 min/mile, I was quite pleased.
Nacho and his friend Matt were there, which was a very nice surprise. They waited for me at the finish line and gave me high fives and back pats, which I must say, are even better than free race t-shirts (which I did not get). Hopefully will see them again tonight.
The Charles River Cleanup event was also taking place, and many of the volunteers participating paused their work and stopped to cheer and give high fives and yell encouragement to the runners. I realized then that running piddly short charity races is probably the closest I will ever get to my childhood dream of being a professional baseball player. And that's okay with me, it's probably closer than lots of people get to their childhood dreams of being ballerina astronaut pony farmers or whatever.
I'm starting to feel like running twice this distance is maybe not as much of an impossible feat as I originally thought. Not quite ready to try it out yet though. My new shoes are awesome, and what I originally thought might be stress fractures in both my ankles doesn't seem to have gotten any worse.
My back hurts, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, and I feel good.

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