Walter Phelps Phun Run 5k Trail Race Report

Sorry it's taken me a little longer than normal to get this race report up.  After the race was over, I didn't have much time to get everything together because I had to jump into the car and drive 3-hours one way to get my girls and then come home, so that meant 6-hours in a car.  It was a long day but I wouldn't have changed a single thing about any of it.

Race morning.

I had already knew it was going to be bad, as in HOT, Saturday morning.  The temperature for the race called for 78 degrees with a real feel temp of 84 degrees with 94% humidity.  So I made sure to get up early enough to get some caffeine in me but to also get some water down.  Just when I went to turn my garmin on, the watch beeped at me "low battery".  Crap, this thing never dies, so it decides to die on the morning I need it.  Since I had 30 minutes to kill, I put it on the charger, said a quick prayer and just left it alone.

At 7:35 I pulled the Garmin off the charger and headed down to the race.  Since I didn't want to push my luck on the battery power on the Garmin, I winged my mile warmup down to the race.  I'm thinking it took me somewhere around 9 minutes to run down.  Once I found my mom, pinned on my number, we waited for all the other people I knew to find us.

As I was standing around waiting for the race to start, I bumped into these two pretty ladies.  I'm the one in the pink shorts and white top.  These two friends of mine have taken up running but the girl in the blue has taken up tris and will do her first one next weekend.

 

Finally 8:30 gets here.  They line everyone up, say a prayer, remind everyone that this is a trail race and off we go.  The start of the race is through some grass and then we enter into the woods.  I was feeling pretty good for the first 1 or so.  We hit the first mile and my watch is showing .90, so I knew right then that this course was going to show short on my watch.  After coming out of the woods, we have to go around this small water reserve.  Here's where my time suffered something fierce.  It rained on Friday and they had just cut the trail on the reserve on Thursday so you can only guess what this part of the race looked like.  I think I gained 5lbs on each shoe because of the mud and this was no simple mud, this was white clay mud.  It stuck to your shoes after coming through it.  Terrible.  After that little detour, we headed back into the woods to finish the race.

My friend's husband was taking pictures of us, so he got this one of me coming out of the woods and heading for the finish line.  At this point I was so tired and spent I had nothing left in me.

As you can see in this picture.  He passed me no problem.  I had never been more happier to see a finish line in all my racing life.  This race was just tough overall.  

Here we are after the race, sweating buckets.  I think I told them before the picture was taken, "I'm sorry if I smell!"

I ended up coming in 2nd female overall and 20th overall with a time of 25:43.  Since I had to leave right after the race, I didn't get to stay around for awards, but I did get a plant (the race directors handed out plants, the race was held in memory of someone who owned garden store) and my mom got a flower as well.

I'm not sure if I'll do this race again next year.  I'll just have to see how the trail does as time goes on.

I have another race in three weeks, it's the 15.5k that I better get to work on.

Angela :)