Tales from 9 Runs: Run 4

Today's run was the Xtreme Urban 5k in Salem.  It was a fun run with various obstacles placed throughout the run such as crawling under barbed wire, climbing over couches and grocery carts, cargo nets, entering the backdoor of a bus, scaling a soapy incline with a knotted rope to help you up, and a potato-sack portion (yes, potato sack racing--yeehaaaa!).  The finale was a slip and slide, which I totally kicked ass on.  If someone were in front of me, they would have been injured by my careening mass.  Luckily, no one was hurt in this race (by me).  For a sense of what it looked like, you can check out the map here.  How did I do for a time?  I'm not entirely sure.  If you look at the time listing here, I'm missing from it.  However, given when a fellow friend finished, I'm guessing that I'm #195 or "Unknown Partic. 424".  I was a known participant, but I think my race tag didn't register a finish or start.  Not sure, but 37:29 seems about the right range of time it took for me.  Not my fastest record by far, but I wasn't expecting that.

I wasn't looking for any records or breakthroughs with this one, just to have fun. I was running in sneakers as opposed to the Vibram 5 Finger kicks that I run regularly in, so I knew from the get-go, my running was going to be off.  I definitely don't like running in regular kicks, but I also knew given the obstacles, I wasn't sure how my shoes might endure, so I played it safe.

Overall, I'm heading into the serious portion of my training--doing my best to get in 3-4 runs a week of 7 miles or more.  I'd like to see 10 miles by early July and another 2 miles by the end of July so that August, I will only have about 3-4 miles left to build up to.  Yes, it's still strange that I'm talking about this like I was doing push-ups or something.  But so it goes.

However, my brother and his team did pretty spectacular.  They came in first for the team runs.  He captured made a short but fun video that captures the run.  Needless to say, if I were on that team, I would have significantly brought down the average, so I was probably better off as a solo runner in this case.

I'm also talking with and teaming up with a few others to do a half-marathon in October, but there may indeed be more runs for me to be talking about.  Anyone interested in joining us--either just to get training or to actually run this half-marathon, please let me know--we're happy to take on more folk!

After the race.

Before the run.

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