Through a series of this-and-that, I ended up running the Crosstown Classic 10K by myself this morning. I mean, me and 2500 other people in “North Side” and “South Side” t-shirts. The headphone jack on my iPhone is still broken, so I didn’t even listen to music. It was kind of nice to have a running version of that classic urban experience: alone in a crowd.

The route was one of the standard Chicago running routes, starting on Arvey Field in Grant Park and heading south past Soldier Field. I’m starting to think that I might soon be seeking out races based on courses I haven’t run rather than my current system of “coolest t-shirt”. (I’ll be starting this plan after the Ditka Dash.)

I just got the email with the official results: Northside beat the Southside with an average time of 58:40 to 1:02:40. That’s based on 1371 Northsiders and 1183 Southsiders—so pretty evenly matched. Other number nerdery: I’ve been noticing that a lot of races are skewing female these days, but this one had more than twice as many women as men: 1751 to 808.

I was a little over the Northsider average. I was toddling along on a sub-one-hour pace until I realized that I had been doing my math for a sub-one-hour six miles and had forgotten the .2 extra of a 10K. I tried to kick it up a little for the last 2 miles, but came in just a hair over.

My results:

Time: 1:00:33
Pace: 9:45 mins/mile
Overall Place: 981 / 2559
Place in Sex: 506 / 808
Place in Age Group (M40-44): 47 / 84