Saturday, August 9, 2008

Dessert Survivor Wins a Shoe

Last week I wrote about running in a little 5K. This week I ran in a much bigger one, with over 500 runners. In a race this big, you never run alone, and that helps you run faster.

The treats at the finish line were very different from last week. There were cookies, but they were McDonald's cookies. All the rest of the food was gone at the end, except the McDonald's cookies.
They also had watermelon, cantaloupe, and bananas. The watermelon was especially refreshing after an exhausting run.
And they had two kinds of tasty muffins. They were almost as good as real cookies.
This race gives away shoes to winners of all the different age categories because it was once part of a festival called the Touch of Dutch festival. It was named for the heavy Dutch settlement of the area. For reasons I do not understand, it was renamed the Town and Country festival, a far less interesting name in my opinion. Anyway, the race, called the Rotary Ramble, is one of the best 5Ks in the area. It attracts some very talented runners, and this year it was the state champion meet for some group.
I managed to cut my time from last week by almost a minute. The cooler weather (and some serious training at the beginning of the week) probably contributed. I was in the top half of the race, and finished third of ten in my age group, which was good enough for a shoe. (There are a lot of age groups, so they give away a lot of shoes. It is really tough to win one if you are in high school because there are so many high school runners who enter.)
I probably will not run another 5K this year, so now I can worry less about how those cookies will affect my running time.

No comments: