Erica, Shaun, and I ran an interesting 5K this morning. It was the inaugural Warm Your Heart 5K, an indoor run at the McCormick Place, the big expo center in downtown Chicago. The promise of the race was that, unlike other indoor races, it was a single loop. McCormick is pretty big, so I had a picture in my head of running around through exhibit hall after hall. It turns out that while McCormick is big, it's not quite that big—the race was held in two of the halls and the route snaked back and forth in loops through the two.
The whole place is all slick concrete and I'm really surprised I didn't see anyone wipe out after the water stations, with big puddles on the concrete. And there were a lot of tight turns. I assume because of that latter, they spaced out the various pace groups with distinct starts. Shaun and I got at the end of the 9 minute/mile group with the intention of slowing down and ending up with the 10 min/mile group. But somehow we just kept running at that pace and I finished the whole thing at a 9:08/mile pace—setting a personal best in a timed 5k. How odd that I'm a faster runner at 42 than ever before in my life.
I'm sure she'll talk about it on her blog, but this was Erica's first race since her accident last year—she did a great job running and I'm really proud of her.
My official results:
Time: 28:17
Pace: 9:08
Overall place: 633 / 1778
Place in sex: 400 / 714
Place in division (M, 40-44): 59 / 99
