Steamboat 4 Mile

My morning started out at 5:00am… I ate a bowl of Special K Red Berries cereal and drank some water. I got dressed and ready and was on the road by 5:30. I recently got a lovely speeding ticket so I’m forced to drive a lot slower than I’m used to. I live about an hour away from Peoria and the race line up was at 6:50 and I still needed to stop by starbucks for my tall skinny caramel latte. I arrived in Peoria at about 6:45 and still needed to find parking!! Luckily I found a spot on the side of the road and hurried to grab my ipod and Garmin. I drank the rest of my bottle of water and realized I also needed to use the restroom. I had no idea where I was going so I just started following the rest of the people that were milling about. I found a port-a-pottie and waited in line. While standing there I realized that I had forgotten to take off my sunglasses!! No matter how cute they are, I really didn’t want to wear them running but I had no choice because I could hear the announcer say that everyone should be lined up and ready to go. I sprinted down the road and found my pace time…. my friend Rocco found me and asked to run with me since I told him I’d be trying to run around 8 minute miles. I sort of tweaked my foot/ankle about a week ago so the only running I had done in the past week was 4 miles on monday night and playing softball on thursday. Oh-and I got in some wakeboarding on thursday night as well 🙂

I could definitley tell that I hadn’t ran for most of the week as I was feeling rather tired… my foot was pounding, but that didn’t stop me from trying to meet my goal time of 31 minutes. At around mile 2 I grabbed some water and that slowed my pace a little bit… but I picked it back up and kept good timing throughout the rest of the race. I did leave enough energy to sprint through to the finish line and pass about 10 people on the way…. it always feels good to end a race sprinting 🙂

Rob and Christine ran the 15k so I grabbed some water, found another friend who was waiting for another 15k runner, and we headed up to cheer them on. After they finished we all headed over to wait for the awards ceremony… Christine finished 16th overall female 🙂 So of course we had to get some pics while we were waiting!

Christine and Me

Me arresting Christine for being WAY too speedy 🙂

When I got home I also realized that the last 4 mile race I ran I finished in 35:57 so I got a PR with a time of 31:39!! Since this day had started out so awesome I invited Rob and Christine down for boating to continue the wonderful day.

Christine and Me soaking up the sun!

Splits: (I’m new with this so I’m not sure how accurate these are)

Mile 1:     7:55
Mile 2:    8:10   (water stop–obviously I need to be quicker with this!)
Mile 3:    7:48
Mile 4:    7:44

My 5k time was 25:00 so this was also a new PR for me!

Stats:

Chip Time:      31:39
Pace:                 7:55
F:                       33/261
Overall:            435/3055