For the Love of It 10K

The first race of the Potomac River Running Race Series for 2018 kicked off yesterday with the For the Love of It 10K. This is the third time I have run this race in four years. It was my 10K PR for 3 years, and continues to be after Saturday's race...its just a little faster now ;)

What a morning it was for a race! If it weren't for the carpool I was participating in, I might have just stayed in bed. But knowing that other crazy runner girls were picking me up for race day (and the promise of pop-tarts at the end of the race) got me out the door.

Since the race was on a Saturday morning, I opted for race day packet pickup. =PR= does a wonderful job with this! They really do make it easy to be able to show up and run. This particular race is also held at a local high school. What makes it extremely convenient is that they use the high school cafeteria as a staging/awards area so you get to 1) hang out in warmth while you wait to run in the cold and 2) get to use real bathrooms instead of port-a-potties. After securing our bibs, we hung out in the hallway until they ushered all the runners to the front of the school where the race would start. It really didn't take long to regret the decision to run this race. :) Here we stood, among some 300 runners, in 12 degree temperatures, waiting to run 6.2 miles of hills. This is why people think runners are crazy!!!

I went into this race with no race strategy at all. According to my plan I was supposed to be running this race at an "easy" pace (11-12 mm), but in mile 1 I wasn't paying attention to the pace at all. I just ran alongside my friend, Heather, and chatted. We both admitted to running faster than we might have due to the cold. So cold, in fact, that I couldn't feel my legs until sometime after the 2 mile marker. The pace felt good though there were definitely moments where I wish I could take a walk break or slow it down a bit. But I really wanted to keep running with Heather, and my ego just wouldn't let me admit to needing to slow down or take a break. So I relished the water stops where we would grab a cup and walk until we gulped down the water. Then it was back to business.

Somewhere around mile 4 I looked at my watch after the mile alert popped up. And then I started doing math in my head. I tried to recall what my 10K PR was and couldn't quite remember the details. I was pretty sure that if we kept our current pace, I was going to set a new PR! That was really not in the plans. I remembered when I set the PR for this race the first time...it was not easy and I recall being super wiped out after. But here we were, on pace for a shiny new PR. I let that toss around in my brain for a while and then finally at around 4 1/2 miles as we cruised toward the bottom of another hill, I asked Heather what her 10K PR was. From that moment, I now had a race strategy, keep going and set that PR!!!! About 3/4 mile later I felt a surge of determination. That LAST big hill was in front of us. And since I have run this course (and the 10 mile course which overlaps right here), I knew that right after this hill there is a nice plateau and then a downhill to the finish on the high school track. So I found another gear and powered up the hill! And then heading into the track I saw some familiar faces at the broadcast booth...so I shouted out to the announcer and grinned as I head down the track....300 meters to go! It didn't feel like the longest 300 meters ever but I swear my 400 m repeats during track workouts go by faster than that last part of the race did. But finish the race strong, I did! With a shiny new PR by nearly 2 minutes :) It was even more wonderful to get to share the finish line experience with my friends.

Final Thoughts:

• Poptarts from Ted's Bulletin are fantastic on any day but even better after running 6 very cold miles!
• Caleb's Cookies is a MUST repeat! I loved the heart shaped cookies we enjoyed after the race...and so did my boys (I may have taken some home to them).
• As a former science teacher, I was definitely not overjoyed with the elevation chart that my Garmin provided. It looked SO flat!!!! So...I created one of my own with a much more appropriate scale to show just how much this course is appropriately named as "rolling hills".
  
• Anytime I get to drink hot cocoa and eat cookies and chat with my MRTT friends and my =PR= family at the same time is time well spent.
• Races with friends are just a million times better than solo races!