Let me just start off by saying that Charlotte rocked and rolled on the four-mile race. As she was the youngest first female finisher, she even got her name and town announced as she sprinted to the finish line. (We found a YouTube video of the four-mile race finish on the Steamboat website…very cool!) Right now, her tally is five races entered, five awards won. This does nothing to keep her humble about her running ability!
Nevertheless, she did place first in the female 10 and under division, and we were very proud of her. I think that she dashed off and left Jeff at the starting line, and she must have passed me pretty early on, although I never saw her in the crowd. She won this beautiful plaque, the biggest one yet in her collection.
Alas, on Monday, she will move up into the 11-14-year-old division in most 5K races, which means that she will now be competing with middle school cross country runners. She would have cracked the top 20 in that age group with her time, but the winners were sub-25 minutes. We’ll see if she likes running well enough to take her training to the next level!
In case you don’t know, the Steamboat has a four-mile race and a 15K race. I decided to run the latter, and my race was, eh, OK. I ran it at just over a 10-minute mile, which is my training pace, so I should be pleased. However, I can usually knock it up a notch during a race, and there was none of that this time around.
The Steamboat 15K touts itself as the “toughest 15K in Illinois,” and, while I don’t have enough race experience to confirm that, it IS a challenging course. It has one very evil hill and another pretty good-sized one…and you have to run each twice because the middle of the race is two, 2.65-mile loops. Add to that pretty high humidity, and I was not in a place to set any personal bests!
After my first time up the evil hill, I was slow to recover and started dreading my second loop. However, when I started getting lapped by the elite and eventually just the faster-than-I runners, I started to look forward to the hill. At least, when I got there the second time, no one else would be lapping me! (I find getting lapped to be a bit demoralizing, if you couldn’t tell!)
In any case, I ran the whole thing and finished strong. This was helped by the fact that the last two miles are pretty much downhill. My time was 1:33:43, which was decent, if not spectacular. As Jeff and Charlotte were done running in under 40 minutes, they had plenty of time to wait at the finish line to take my picture! (Poor Jeff is the only one who didn’t get his picture taken finishing, although you can see him on the YouTube video!)
After I finished the race, the rain moved in. I heard someone comment that this was probably the first time the temperature was lower at the end of the race than at the beginning, so we were ready to leave. However, we decided to check if Charlotte had placed before we took off and found a kind race official who looked her up in the computer. Sure enough…first place. So we hung around for a good 90 minutes after I finished so that Charlotte could collect her well-deserved award!
Each of the 15K finishers got a medal, and Jeremy thought mine was pretty cool. He looked like a drowned rat by this time, but he didn’t seem to mind!
My dad came down for the weekend and hung out with my boys while Jeff, Charlotte, and I ran the race. We celebrated at home by grilling steaks and drinking margaritas. (Well, Jeff and I did anyway!) It seemed a fitting end to a busy morning. Poor Jeremy fell asleep on the way home, slept through lunch, and woke up nearly four hours later. I guess he wasn’t thrilled about being woken up at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning!
And that’s my race day story. Talk to you soon!
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