Turkey Trot 5K

Happy Thanksgiving! Matt and I kicked off our holiday weekend at 8:45am with the Seven Summits 5K Turkey Trot in Chesterbrook, PA. Well actually we didn’t end up kicking anything off at 8:45 because the race started extremely late… What I really should say is that we stood around with 595 other runners for 30 minutes in the windy 29°F weather before kicking our weekend off at 9:15! 🙂 The cold wait obviously didn’t slow Matt down… he was one of the top 100 finishers and his 23:53 finishing time was a 28 second personal best!

My race wasn’t too shabby, either. I finished in 25:23 which was good enough for 56th female (out of 317). Overall, I’m happy with that because of the wind and frigid temps, but I have to admit that my goal going into the race was to run sub-25 so I’m a tiny bit sad that I didn’t do that. Not too sad though, because I still came within a mere 7 seconds of my personal best! Plus, now I feel that much more determined to run even faster in our next 5K on December 15th!!

Here are my RunKeeper stats for the race. Probably my most even-paced race so far… I was attempting to go out nice and steady and maintain an 8:00-ish pace for the entire race (which would have given me my desired sub-25 time) but I couldn’t quite keep that pace up. In my next race I think I’ll go back to the strategy of going out more aggressively in the first mile and finishing with whatever I have left.

As I mentioned before there were several hundred people in the race so after we finished we didn’t stick around. Instead we hopped in the car, cranked up the heat, and went out for bagels and coffee. Oh, but we were well disciplined and did run a little cool down in the bagel shop’s parking lot before going in to eat. I’m sure the people in the shop thought we were nuts! Here I am on the drive home with my coffee. I was very happy to be done running and ready to start the Thanksgiving festivities!