Racing for Corn

The kids and I are visiting my parents this weekend (while husband negotiates an insane work project), and--as is my habit--I looked for a nearby race to capitalize on the free babysitting. A quick perusal of the race calendar revealed a 5k associated with a local Corn Festival. Sure, why not. It's in a town even smaller than my hometown, a twenty minute drive down a country highway. I parked on the edge of a field, not far from a tent offering "Pork and Beans BBQ"; oddly enough, their wares actually smelled pretty good to me, even at 7:30 in the morning. I quickly signed up (cheap! only $20, with a shirt!) and ran an easy warm-up while sizing up the competition. I saw quite a few women wearing fancy technical outfits and racing flats, which surprised me. (As usual, I was wearing my dusty Kayano clunkers and a bra top purchased from Target in the pre-baby era.) I've noticed that runners in Texas wear a lot fancier gear than runners in California, even though folks here are, as a whole, substantially slower. Maybe it's because triathlons (notoriously gear-obsessed) are more popular here? Anyway, I figured some of the flat-wearing, shimmel-sporting women would be fast.

I only had time for a mile of warm-up and was already soaking with sweat when I lined up at the start. I'm not exactly acclimated to the heat and humidity here, yet. My expectations were low, especially given the flare up of recurring pelvic/groin pain this week. Not to mention that most of my (relatively meager) mileage recently has been at 9-minute mile pace. I looked at my watch sometime during the first mile and saw 6:55 pace. I knew that was probably too quick for my current fitness, so I tried to loosen up a little. The miles passed by quickly. After several years of running long, slow trail races, 5ks seem to fly by now. It's an odd sensation. I'm so accustomed to the mental game of dividing up the miles in a 50k, that the 5k is almost too fleeting a distance to parse. It was an out-and-back course, so I saw at the turn-around that I was the third woman. Numbers one and two were too far ahead of me to attempt to catch, and I was comfortably in front of four. I decided to cruise in and not exacerbate the growing pain in my groin. My watch said 22:23 at the finish--not good, certainly; but not too bad given my training and the conditions. I used to run 5ks in 20-ish minutes (give or take 30 seconds), so 22 minutes still feels slow. But it also simultaneously feels fast, since I very rarely approach that pace in training anymore.

I placed 3rd OA, and 1st in my age group--not exactly a speedy feat, given the competition. I managed a mile of aimless cool-down before succumbing to the heat and decided to wait (for what turned out to be a long time) for the awards. I got a corn trophy, which I quickly photographed as Facebook fodder for my friends in CA.

Ideally I'd do a long run--or, at least, what constitutes a "long" run for me these days--tomorrow, but I'm not sure about my groin issues. I generally end up running through them and they go away eventually, but maybe a day or two of rest would hurry up the evanescence of pain?