Hello blog world!  Matt and I are enjoying a relaxing weekend southwest of L.A. in California’s Temecula wine country.  We tasted wine all day and as I type this post I am sitting on our private patio at Ponte Vineyard Inn looking out at this gorgeous view of grape vines and mountains… AMAZING!

I’m getting ahead of myself, though.  I’m sure I’ll be doing a full recap of our time in Temecula next week, but the purpose of this post is to recap the 5K that Matt and I ran in Las Vegas on Thursday!  The race was the Security 5K, a fundraiser event sponsored by the security conference/expo that we were exhibiting at in Vegas for work.  Here I am post-race, just before we jumped on a shuttle bus to get back to our hotel in time for the expo’s 10am start.

The flat 3.1 mile course was a few miles off the strip at a local park just south of the airport.  There were 380 participants (308 men and 71 women) and the race started at 7:30am.  I typically eat breakfast 3 hours before race time, which meant that I had to venture down to the Palazzo Casino’s gaming floor to get breakfast at 4:30am.  That’s the earliest I’ve been in a casino and there were some interesting characters down there who had definitely been up drinking and gambling all night!

The start of the race was pretty chaotic.  The only other race that I’ve done with more than 300 participants was last year’s Turkey Trot.  For that race they had the 600+ runners lined up on a road that was the same width as the starting line so that start went pretty smoothly.  That was not the case for the Vegas 5K though, where all 380 runners plus all of the 2K walkers were massed together in a big, wide blob at the start line.  The crowd was significantly wider than the start line, so when the gun went off everyone patiently began to walk forward before politely waiting their turn to cross the line.   This makes sense because the race was chipped, but it was still weird not to take off running when the race started!!!

Matt finished the race 122nd overall (113th male) with a 24:41.  I finished 146th overall (13th female!) with a 25:26.  I’ve really been hoping to go sub-25 but considering the traveling, long work hours at the expo, and higher than usual elevation, I was pretty happy with my time.  As my splits show, I felt like I got a great start (I even kept up with Matt for a while!) but then my speed sort of petered out in the last mile.  I didn’t know at the time because the race was chipped, but the 12th place woman beat me by less than a second! I’m pretty sure that I would have been able to run a little faster at the finish if we had been running neck and neck, so I’m going to use this as a lesson to always finish as strong as I possibly can, especially in a chipped race where the actual person you’re competing against might be several seconds ahead of or behind you.

After the 5K we spent Thursday and Friday working at the expo.  Then we packed up on Friday and headed west to California!  I’ll wrap up this post on that note because it’s time for me to stop blogging and start reading a book while watching the sun set over the vineyards.  I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday evening!

Miles since last post:  20.0
Days since last post:  6
Avg. Daily Miles since 7/18/13: 4.84
2014 TOTAL MILES: 456.3

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