As usual I look like a hideous freak in all of my on-course photos! It's the curse that never ends!!! The only decent photo is from the pre-race when I was making my way over to the start line.
On Sunday I met up with 15,000 runners in our nation's capital to run the 40th edition of the Cherry Blossom festival. I don't know what the final breakdown was on the 10 miler runners versus the 5k runners, but it was a ton of runners!
As usual, it was a girls weekend with my bestie, B. We really do need to find a hobby that doesn't include waking up well prior to the crack of dawn, physical pain, and sheer exhaustion. We picked up food from Whole Foods, watched Like Crazy, and gossiped :)
We also got me fitted for some new kicks on Saturday at B's running store. I've made the switch to Saucony Glide 5 and did what you're never supposed to do when making a switch to a new shoe - I raced in it the very next day.
Whoops!
I wanted to run 8:45 miles for this race, yet I committed another deadly running mistake and went out too fast. B and I got separated prior to the start of the race and then when the wave that we were both in walked up to the start I saw her ahead of me. Like an idiot I tried to catch up to her so that I could say, "see you later!" Dumb move on my part. I did feel strong during the first half of the race and actually had to keep reminding myself to pull it back. I looked down at my watch during mile 4 and saw that I was doing a 7:40 mile and I really had to focus on slowing it down.
Here's my splits for the day. I'm happy with the splits, I just wish they would have been in a different order. I would have loved to have that 8:04 mile be around miles 7-9. I think my mile times definitely came down in the second half of the race because that's when I started to stop to take water and I still have to walk through the water stops in order to get any water down. I'm defective that way.
Post-race B and I met up with some of her running group friends. I was psyched because I wasn't the slowest person in the group! I've meet her running group a few times in the past and it was actually really cool during the race because we would cheer for each other. That was a new experience and I rather enjoyed it.
B freaking killed it during the race! She ran 7:45 miles, which is awesome.
Of course, my bestie freaking loves pink and worse, loves to throw it in my face. I hate the color pink. I figured B would have given me crap when I got fitted on Saturday and the salesperson put me in a pair of pink Sauncony's. I told her they were comfortable, but there was no way I was walking out the door with them in that color. B just snickered.
In case you couldn't tell, my leg is the pale one on the right!
It might just be that my giant feet don't look good in pink. B's freakishly small feet can pull off the bright colors, but mine just can't.
I'm extremely happy that the Cherry Blossom organizers re-worked the lottery this year and made the change that if a runner had been shutout by the lottery in the previous two years that mean the runner gained automatic entry into this year's race. That's how I got in! I'm excited because that hopefully should mean that I'm guaranteed to run the Cherry Blossom every few years.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the weekend played out. I got to spend some quality time with my bestie, ran faster than I wanted to, and most importantly I got all the bad ju-ju out of my beloved 2011 Baltimore Half Marathon Shirt. That shirt is perfect to race in and I'm glad to have it back in my racing attire.
Anyone else run the Cherry Blossom?
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