I just barely got beaten by a dog, but at least I came in ahead of the strollers.

What's the perfect remedy to make up for a night of unrestrained eating and debauchery? A 5k run, of course! Yesterday was the Brick City 5k run/walk, one of the last events of Brick City weekend. It was free, so I figured: why not? The weather even looked like it was going to cooperate: ~55º, partly sunny. The only problem was: WIND. WHOA.

Matthany, pre-race

The race was underway at 10AM. We took kind of a funny route around campus - starting at K lot, we went south around the loop, turned up the road by S-lot, past global village, turned right at engineering, ran up the quarter mile to the sundial, took a left past my old dorm (Bldg 32!), left again down the path that goes down by the field house, up the main drag by the info booth, along Andrews Mem. Drive until C lot, and then back up to Gracie's for the finish. Phew! Not a course I have ever traveled in that order before, and not even the direction I normally travel in (I do everything counter-clockwise; it's the figure skater in me). 

To add to the confusion, there were no mile markers; so even though I was keeping time on my watch I had no idea what my pace was. To throw another variable into the mix, the wind was really strong, and much of the course we were running straight into it - I felt like I was going nowhere! Okay, this sounds like a bunch of complaining, but it's really not - I liked the weather anyways, because it was nice to have moving air; and I almost liked that there were no distance markers, because the whole time I pushed myself, thinking I was behind my normal pace. There's only 1 thing that disappointed me - my shoe came untied! Right by engineering, we had finished coming up a hill and were on a downhill so I was in the middle of a nice surge of energy, and my laces went flying despite the double knot. Boooo! Next time I'm triple knotting.

The last bit of the race felt pretty horrible - as evidenced by this picture I'm in right before the finish line:

UGGGGHHHHHH

Not flattering but pretty accurate for how I was feeling. Meanwhile, where did those 2 guys come from? Right at the very end, they pushed by me (almost literally pushed) on my right. I always heard that if you had the energy left to sprint that hard to the end, then you weren't working enough during the rest of the race. Just saying.

I don't know whether there are official results anywhere, but I read the clock as 30:29 as I ran by. Which I know is not impressive to any of you real runners out there, but that is a new personal best for me! In fact, my best training time this year was 30:12 around the loop of campus; and I figure that once you factor in the time it took for me to even get to the start line (I was far back) and the time wasted re-tying my shoe, this was my best time ever. So, yeah, I was pretty happy with that.

At the finish there was a truck giving out milk - wha? I guess it makes sense, but I really didn't want milk seeing as I was struggling to regain my breath. What I did want was an Intense Milk-branded squishy moo cow, which they gave me - yay! I also scored a steel water bottle from Alumni Relations which is really nice quality. So I may not have been winning any races, but I still came away with prizes, score!

Anyways, what a fun way to close out Brick City Weekend. My spiRIT is at an all time high and I'm already looking forward to next year!