This morning I ran Martin’s Run 5K at my favorite local running spot, Ridley Creek State Park.  I’ll skip the race for a moment go right to the takeaways… check out these goodies!!  Best 5K haul EVER, right???

Yup, you’re seeing that right.  That’s a first place age group medal, a $25 gift certificate to Giant, a $50 gift cert to Buca di Beppo, a snazzy red t-shirt, and, oh yeah… a baseball autographed by Phillies first baseman, Ryan Howard!  The gift certificates were part of the (extremely generous) age group award and the baseball was the lucky result of $5 worth of raffle tickets that I bought on a whim after the race.  Good job, me!

The race itself was pretty awesome as well.  The 46° start temperature was the coldest weather I’ve run in since April and it felt fantastic.  We started on the park’s multi-use trail right at picnic area 17 and followed an out and back course over relatively flat terrain.  There was a downhill right before the turnaround point (and, consequently, an uphill right after the turnaround point!), but it really didn’t feel too hard after the hills at Run A Muck two weeks ago.

Unfortunately I have no idea what my splits were in today’s race.  Runkeeper occasionally likes to torment me by losing its GPS signal and bouncing my path all over the map, resulting in wildly inaccurate splits.  The app worked normally for my warm up and cool down, but decided to go haywire during the actual race, cheerfully reporting that I completed my first mile in a mere 3 minutes, 51 seconds when I had barely made it through the first half mile.  I was able to manually correct the course lines after the race but the timing data was lost.  Oh well!  I had a timer going on my (non-GPS) watch during the race as well so I filled in the few spots where I happened to look at it on the map below.

Regardless of what my splits were, I’m really happy with how today’s race went.  I finished in 23:54, 3rd place female, 1st place AG, and 13th overall out of 104 participants.  That’s two sub-24 races in a row!!!  🙂

Matt skipped today’s race but it turns out that I wasn’t alone.  I found two friends from my Monday night running group before the race started.  Yay!  I also came across a big, green Philadelphia celebrity after the race and got my picture taken with him…

I’ll be taking a break from racing next weekend because Matt and I will be busy partying it up with my brother-in-law and his soon-to-be wife at their wedding!!  Then my next race will be the Fueled Up and Fired Up 5K on October 18th.  Last year’s Fueled Up was the first 5K that I did without walking and I’m looking forward to seeing how much faster I can finish this year!

Miles since last post:  39.2
Days since last post:  7
Avg. Daily Miles since 7/18/13: 4.86
2014 TOTAL MILES: 1350.1

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