The Old Runner

It was our third trip to the Santa Scramble in three years and was a lot of fun as usual. This was my first race since the New York City Marathon and things have been going nicely for me, as I seem to have survived with no injuries or other ill effects. I’m glad to finally be out of marathon mode, which is something altogether different than training for shorter races, and having figured out once and for all I’m not really too great at running marathons, I’m quite content to be facing nothing in the future longer than a half marathon. If you’re looking for the fastest 5k around, this one is probably the one to run, so you might want to add it to your calendar for next year. Each year it leads off the Concord Christmas parade so the course is lined with an estimated 20,000 people. About 99% of them are there to watch the parade so they’re not cheering for the runners, but still, they’re witnesses so if you have a little pride you’ll step up the running a notch just because people are w...

This was the inaugural running of the Hendrick Marrow Program Half Marathon held at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. The field of runners was small, probably 50 or 60 runners for each race (half marathon and 5k). As we lined up to run, the race director told us that they purposely didn’t advertise the race because it was the first one and they wanted to iron out all the kinks, so we were a test group of sorts, and that next year they were planning a big advertising campaign surrounding the race. Sounds logical to me. There were definite kinks to be worked out but it was truly a unique half marathon and I’m glad we ran it. The entire race took place on the grounds of Lowe’s Motor Speedway, which is huge, so it’s not hard to map out a course 13.1 miles long. We ran up and down the ZMAX Drag Strip twice (at the beginning and as we were finishing) and ran around The Dirt Track and around the outside of the big speedway before going inside and taking a lap around the big track itself, which was pret...

I won’t say I told you so, but I did tell you: this is the fastest 5k race in the area. I of course was relying on my old fogged-up memory of running it last year but that was the way I remembered it. Today as our GPS system took us right down the course I was able to get a new look at it, and it wasn’t quite as downhill as I remembered although the trend was definitely more down than up. Actually there are quite a few flat areas along the way for the first two miles, with some gentle downhill and just a couple of tiny uphill areas, with the last mile being a huge downhill nearly to the finish line, with just a little bit of uphill over the last 200 yards or so. It’s still a fast one, and of all the races I’ve run I’m convinced it’s the fastest. Most of the races I’ve run over the past couple months have been longer ones, but my times have steadily gotten better anytime I’ve run a 5k. Last year when I ran this race I cut about a minute and a half off my previous Personal Record, finis...

Although we were scheduled to run the All-Star 5k in Asheville this weekend, when we hopped out of bed this morning we decided to change ears and head over to the Bunny Run 5k in Concord instead. I didn’t have a picture of the race logo so I’ll take this opportunity to attach a picture of my 4-month-old granddaugther Eva wearing her bunny ears. I think all of that running I’ve been doing in Asheville is starting to pay off because the considerable number of hills didn’t seem to phase me today, and I finished first in my age group and 24th overall out of 225 runners with a time of 22:55, which is my new 5k personal record (yay!). In addition, as opposed to last week’s 10k in which I walked a total of 10 times, this week I ran without any walk breaks at all. It’s not something I planned really, but I just do these little mental checks often in a race and ask myself if I feel like I’m about to croak, and today my ultimate demise didn’t seem to be imminent so I just kept on running. The a...