Racing in the Rain

This past Sunday morning featured the wettest race of my life.  The sky Sunday morning was gray and the rain was coming down...yet, due to some insane drive to run, contribute to charity or some other reason, I as well as over 600 people lined up to race the Butterfly 5K this weekend!

I was psyched to see many familiar faces at the start - Tammy, Chrissy and Meri, as well Jen from Chicago, Libby, Allison and Lauren!  As miserable as running in the rain is, friendly faces always help.

We stood around for about an hour before the race ... which means we started the race soaked.  I am not going to lie - this was miserable.  Cold, wet and miserable.  The actual running wasn't bad...until the last mile.  My splits on miles 1 and 2 were about the usual (9:18 for the first mile and 19:02 for the second) but things were off for the last mile and I finished in 30 minutes and some odd seconds, which is about 30-45 seconds slower than my usual finish time.  If you have not raced you are probably thinking "Whats 30 seconds? Thats nothing"...if you have raced, you can probably imagine my frustration.  30 seconds is a lot of time in a race...Shaving a minute off a race time is a huge feat...so a backslide of 30 seconds is pretty disheartening.  Worst yet is that I was not tired at the end of the race! I usually go a little easier in my last mile of any race to gather some energy than run real fast (for me) the last quarter mile or so.  The problem here?  I didn't know the course, misjudged how much course was left AND didn't have my race watch on to estimate the time.  The result was a lousy finish. 

Even though a big part of me wants to call the race a fail, it wasn't.  So my time was off and I didn't finish hard.  I showed up - and so did hundreds of others - to race through the rain.  That in itself is a win.

A special congrats to Tammy who came in 4th in her division and to Libby who came in FIRST in hers!