A while back I signed up for a local race series called “It’s Jus Hair” put on my the local company Jus Run. It sounded like a fun little series, 3 different 5k’s and if you do them all you earn a special extra medal.

I remember thinking it was weird when I signed up that I was registering for a 5k in 2015 so far in advance. But I wanted to sign up for the whole series at once. The first one, the Blonds event, was held on May 31, 2014!

And this race kind of just appeared, “Hey, look! I have the Brunettes 5k this week.” I tweaked my training schedule for the week, instead of doing 4 miles on Friday I ran the 5k on Saturday morning, simple enough switch except it’s always a challenge to do a race on Saturdays during my husband’s busy season. (He’s a CPA. January-May = busy season)

 

When I signed up for this race I had assumed I would just push “A” in the stroller during the event. But when I made that plan, the race was supposed to be held at a different park… but apparently the permit fees for that park increased a lot for 2015 and a lot of race directors can’t afford to have their events there now. So the race was moved to Floyd Lamb State Park, which means the race would be run on trails. AND it rained all day on Friday and all night before the race. I knew I didn’t want to push the stroller through mud, so I begged my hubby to go into the office a little later.

My plan was to run, collect my medals and hop in the car as fast as possible to get out of there so my husband could go to work. I rolled into the race about 9 minutes before the start. I listened to the course instructions, lined up and started to run after we were given the “GO!”

It was an out-and-back course and the first quarter-mile or so was on a paved path around a little lake in the park. There are a lot of birds that call the park home and there was a really good layer of goose poop on the path. Thick, green layer that was all wet and slimy from the rain. It was slick and it gathered all over in my shoe treads. I had a couple of moments where I felt my feet slipping as I tried to pass people. I didn’t want to fall, much less fall in a pile of bird doo! Once I hit the trail, that helped to pull some of the poop off somewhat.

My first two miles were great, but I don’t know what was going on in mile 3. Suddenly I felt very tired and sad. I was just thinking, “Why am I doing this? This is hard and I could have slept in longer and I could be at home cuddled on the couch with my warm, sweet little girl.” But after I left the trails and hit the paved path again and knew the end was almost here, I was energized and picked it up again. I’m thinking it was due to not eating anything before I left. The brain needs fuel to be happy!

I crossed the finish line, grabbed my medal for that race, went over to the table to collect my medal for having completed the series and noticed the computers to check your time had no line. So I punched in my bib number and saw that I was 3rd in my age group, F 35-39. I stopped by the race director’s table on my way back to my car and thanked her for the fun series and she graciously offered to get my ribbon for me since I couldn’t hang out for the award ceremony!

I walked back to my car, scraped my feet on some rocks, set my stuff in the car and took my shoes off so I wouldn’t track goose poop all over inside my car.

As I was pulling out of the park, my husband was pulling in to drop the kid off with me. Once at home, I made myself some breakfast and ate that with “A”, then got her set up to watch an episode of Dora while I took a shower to wash the goose poop off the back of my legs!

I checked the results and I ended up being 13 of 128 runners. Interestingly, 101 of those runners were women. I was 8th of 101 women and 3rd of 21 F 35-39 runners. I did have fun and I was happy with my outcomes, even if it wasn’t quite as relaxed as I would have preferred.