Before I go back to our vacation, I just want to say a short word about the weather.
I thought that I would get up at 5:30 today for my run to beat the heat. Ha! It felt like 85 degrees, and I could literally wring out my clothes when I got home. Where is this weather coming from?! Yesterday, we had temperatures of 99 and heat indexes of 112 to 114. Today? Temps of 98, heat indexes between 112 and 120. WHAT?
I might expect this if I still lived in Tennessee or Mississippi. But we live in PEORIA, for crying out loud. I’ve decided that any running I do during this heat wave is endurance training and nothing else. A 10:14 pace over four miles today? I’ll take it!
Speaking of running, back to our vacation…
On Monday, July 4, we woke up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As I couldn’t completely take the week off from running, Jeff and I came up with the brilliant idea of seeing if there was a Firecracker Run anywhere in the area. This seemed safer than setting out alone in a strange city and more enjoyable than a treadmill.
We hit pay dirt in the small town of Lennox, about 20 minutes south of Sioux Falls. The Lennox Lions Club sponsor an annual Firecracker Road Race, with distances of 1 mile, 2 miles, 5 kilometers, and 10 kilometers. Jeff thought that he might like to run, too, and Charlotte is always up for a race. We did some fast talking to our child who hates organized running and managed to talk him into giving it a whirl, and Jeremy was good to go with his stroller.
It was settled. I would run the 10K for a solid longer run, and Jeff and the kids would run the 5K. The race was $10 for kids and $15 for adults, payable at the door, and included a t-shirt. It doesn’t get much better than that!
Race time was 8:00, so we stumbled down to breakfast around 6:30. Unbeknownst to us, as this was a holiday, breakfast wasn’t actually being served until 7:00 that day, but we managed to find some cereal and bagels to eat before we hit the road. We got to Lennox around 7:20 and headed into the local high school to get registered.
There was no preregistration for this race, so we just hopped into the appropriate lines and were signed up before we knew it! At 8:00, we went to our appropriate starting corrals (lines painted on the road), where an older gentleman thanked us all for being here and for making this the largest Firecracker Road Race that Lennox had ever hosted. (Wow. There may have been 200 people total for all the races.) Then, with the pop of a firecracker, we were off!
I must say that this was a nicely done race. The water stops were appropriate, the course was relatively flat, and we were blessed that day with cooler weather and a nice breeze. There was not much shade, as one might expect in South Dakota farm country, but I had a great run, averaging a 9:08 mile. I wanted to finish in under an hour, which I did.
Charlotte took off at the start of the race, and, while she didn’t place this time, she still had a good run. Elijah stuck with Jeff and Jeremy for the first half of the race but eventually asked Jeff if he could just take off. He finished well ahead of his dad, which really made his day! Jeremy, who was riding in an umbrella stroller, finally had too much and was asleep when he crossed the finish line just in front of Jeff, who told me they were getting some pretty good laughs when they finished. I admire Jeff for pushing that jangly stroller for 3.1 miles; a piece of sports equipment it is not!
Anyway, this was a great time, much enjoyed by all of us. Here we are before we drove back to Sioux Falls.
We drove through the town of Tea on our way to the hotel. This cracked us all up, Charlotte in particular, so I snapped a picture of Tea’s water tower. You can imagine the punch lines.
We got back to the hotel around 9:30, where, much to our surprised delight, breakfast was still being served, due to the holiday hours. We were pretty hungry by then and much enjoyed our second breakfast, when the hot food was actually out!
After that, we cleaned up, packed up, and headed out to see what we could see in Sioux Falls. And I’ll tell you about that next time.
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