Aquarium Run 5k

The Aquarium Run has always been an early April race with a 5k, 10k, and half-marathon. I was planning on running the half-marathon when I started planning out my spring races. I looked it up to confirm the date and saw the race had been moved to June this year. Upon further inspection, I discovered they downsized to only a 5k. I wasn't too enthused for a June 5k and figured I may not run it this year. Then I saw the cute, little puffer fish that was on the shirts and medals and I decided I would run it! The race was at 8:00 so I slept in until 6:30 and then got up to get ready. I didn't plan on too long of a warm up so I wasn't worried about getting there super early. I got parked and ran a mile warm up and just stopped off at a porta potty I saw out by some construction during my warm up to skip the lines. I made it to the start line with about 3 minutes to spare. 

They counted us down at the start and we were off. I figured I would probably be able to average around 7:00 pace and was hoping to finish in under 22 minutes. When we took off, I felt comfortable and was immediately in first female position. I didn't look at my watch at all during the race, only catching my mile splits when my watch beeped. I went through the first mile in 6:51. Around that time a guy came up beside me and kept talking and encouraging me. He was being really nice, but I was running my own race and really didn't need a pep talk. He eventually started pumping up a high school aged boy running by us and the kid got excited and took off running really fast, but then had to walk a little bit later. The course was an out and back. When we made the turn around I focused on maintaining pace for the 2nd mile as best I could. I counted that I was in 17th pace so I decided to see how many people I could pick off in the 2nd half of the race. My 2nd mile was 7:08.

With less than a half mile to go, a kid in front of me turned to the right and went up to cross a bridge to the other side of the river toward Riverside. I started yelling at him, telling him he was going the wrong way and tried to wave him back. He glanced back at me, but just kept going. I felt badly that I wasn't able to get him to turn around, but if he wasn't listening to me, there wasn't much I could do. I looked down a couple times in the last mile and saw my average lap pace was 7:01. I tried to push down to under 7:00 for the last mile, but ended up running it in 7:01. There were some fun runners finishing their races as I was finishing and one sprinted against me at the end of the race. I was able to run a pretty quick last portion of the race with a 6:34 pace for my finishing kick. My finish time was 21:46 which was an average of 7:00 exactly. I finished 12th out of 483 overall so I passed quite a few people in the back half and 1st out of 283 women.

After the race I ran a 2 mile cool down. When I was a mile into my cool down I saw the boy who made the wrong turn coming back down off the bridge from the other side of the river so he added quite a bit of distance to his race with that wrong turn. They had a nice spread of food and I took one of everything to share with Ty and the kids when I got home. Then I changed out of my sweaty clothes and went into the Aquarium to see the animals which was fun. The next day as I was running, I was thinking about how awesome my race was and was feeling proud of myself. Then I started to get a bit into my head that 7:00 pace is what I was running half-marathons in before my bone spurs and now that's the pace I'm running for a 5k. I glimpsed my tattoo on my arm as I was thinking that and it made me think of what my grandpa would say and I know he would be telling all his friends that his almost 39 year old granddaughter is still fast enough to win 5ks. It really helped me reframe my mind and focus on the positive. Hearing my grandpa's voice in my head has really helped with that and my tattoo has been a wonderful gift in that way!