Another one done!

I soooooo needed this weekend away. The 10 Miler was just really an excuse to fly out to DC and see as many friends as I could in a few short days. Dinners, a 5k (yes, Heather and I ran a 5k with her son on Saturday AND the 10 miler on Sunday. We’re nuts.) a Nats game (fun!), meeting new babies and husbands, lunches, impromptu tour of the Pentagon and happy hour. It was a jam packed weekend, and I am so so fortunate to have friends like these in my life.

The race itself was great! So so so many people. 1/3 of Team Cherry Trou (more on our team name later) is on injured reserve, and she agreed to carry our clothes and take Heather’s son over to the 1/2 mile kids race. Since we weren’t checking a bag, we allowed ourselves the absolute bare minimum of time to get to the race. We joined the start corral as the starting gun went off and were able to start with most of our wave. Not bad!

And it was a fun race! Well, until mile 7. That stretch along Hains Point is just NOT FUN. It wasn’t fun last year, and it wasn’t fun this year. I, again, lost any motivation to maintain my pace – looking at my mile splits, I really lost it. And I’ve been having trouble with my left hip/glute/piriformis – literally a pain in my butt – for the past few weeks and it was really giving me trouble. Still giving me trouble. Stay tuned to see how this plays out over the next few months.

All in all, I finished in 1:36:02, a whopping 30 seconds faster than last year. And I’m more than happy with that. It was fun to run fast at sea level and not feel like I’m dying. In comparison, my runs here in Denver average 10-11:30 minutes per mile, while my tempo/faster runs have been 9:15 – 9:45 minutes per mile. As I looked up my results, I saw that a total of 17,849 people finished the race – 10,590 of them women. Digressing from the overall topic of this blog post, I think it is really awesome that more women are running these races than men.

So, what’s up with our team name? This race holds a lottery for participants. When we registered for the lottery for the 2013 race, we all individually registered and were lucky enough that we all got in. To not rely on luck this time around, we registered as a team, and we needed a team name. “Cherry” for the name of the race, and “Trou” … well, if you’re a West Pointer, you already know. But fun fact for non-grads, Trou, according to UrbanDictionary.com, means “A female cadet at West Point. When women first came to the academy, the way their hips looked in the men’s uniforms was a point of ridicule, so they started to be called trousers, or trou.” And back when women were first admitted to the academy (1976), it was not a nice term. We’ve since embraced the term and use Trou often when talking about a gaggle of women grads.

Random Thoughts about the Race:

• Peanut Butter Gu is disgusting. Take my word for it.
• Taping both feet with KT tape was a great idea.
• Spectators have the best signs: “Worst Parade Ever” and “Since when is Long and Hard a bad thing?”