The Old Runner

After an unplanned interruption in the race schedule last week, we were back up and running at this week’s James K. Polk 5k held at Belle Johnston Park in Pineville, North Carolina. It was a beautiful summer day but kind of on the hot and humid side, especially during the race. There were a couple of challenging hills, especially one (for me anyway) at about the beginning of the third mile. Although I’m still a big believer in the Jeff Galloway run-walk-run method, once again I kept chugging away without any walk breaks. I keep telling myself, “If you feel like you’re gonna die, then walk a while.” Then I ask myself whether I’m about to die, and usually the answer is no, so I keep going. Occasionally the answer is yes, and at that point the least of my worries is whether I’m walking or not, so the walk breaks are still an option. One thing that seems to have helped me keep going is taking hills somewhat more slowly so that I’m not completely exhausted, so I’ve been able to recover aft

I had heard they were expecting about 1200 runners for this race so I was surprised to see in the results there were only 678 finishers. Still, that’s a big race and I used my standard scientific measure of race size: I watch for Linda to cross the finish line then I go to meet her. If I can find her right off the bat then it’s a fairly small race. Today I walked around for about 10 minutes until somebody who had seen her heading for the porta potties headed me in the right direction. The Run for Your Cause 4-Miler is the second of only two double points races in the RFYL Grand Prix and the fifth race in the nine-race series so all of the fast folks vying for position in the Grand Prix were there. I received a jolt of reality when I found out that a couple of the fastest runners in the 50-54 age group had recent birthdays and are now in my age group, dropping me like a ruptured colostomy bag out of the running for placing in the top 3. Optimist that I am though, I see that as an oppo

Finishing at a time of 21:39, I set a new personal record for the 5k. Celebrations ensued all around the country with fireworks displays, parties, and God knows what else. I was a little embarrassed by the outpouring of support since it was only 2 seconds off my old PR, but hey. When I mentioned it to Linda, she shot down the notion that any of the hoopla was over my new PR. Instead she said it had something to do with somebody named Joey Chestnut eating 68 hot dogs at Coney Island. Yeah right. Either way, it was a fun race. It was the second race we’ve run at the Huntersville Family Fitness and Aquatic Center (the first one was the  Fall Harvest Run  back on 11/08/08), and on the way home Linda mentioned that both of those races have been two of her favorites. It’s really a nice facility and they do a great job with the races out there. Once again the T-shirts were high quality technical material shirts just like in the Fall Harvest Run and are among the best you’ll get at any race.