Chris - 3.1

Got a little bit of a late start this morning, but figured I was okay....until I hit traffic on 26 behind a crash. So as soon as I got into downtown Portland I found a place to park on the street (Park and Market) and ran toward the waterfront. Figured I could just use that as my warmup. I had about 10 minutes to use the bathroom, check in my extra clothes and get to the start line. Five guys I work with were running in the race too. I saw them way in the back of the race line and thought about going to say hey, but I had 3 minutes left and wanted to stretch and warm up a little more before I headed up to the front. It was pouring down rain early this morning, but we got lucky with the 5k. No rain and a little blue sky even!

I didn't have high hopes for this race considering I was sick and hardly ran the past 2 weeks. Also the shin/knee bruise I have hurts like hell when I flex my shin muscle, so I had a very slight limp the whole race. Here's a map of the race route. Not particularly flat. I started out okay, but didn't feel like I really hit my stride until a little over a mile in. They had this 5K sign for when we turned off of Naito, but it didn't say 1 MILE so I didn't hit my watch. Came through the 2nd mile marker @ 13:46. I knew I had absolutely no shot to break my 19:20 from RFTC, so I just did my best to stride out on the downhill portions and concentrate on catching as many of the 10k and half marathon people as I could before the finish. That was nice because usually I'm the one getting passed in the last mile, haha. Maybe I actually didn't start too fast this time! Passed mile 3 with a 6:26 split, then had to run uphill away from the waterfront to the finish. Came through with a final time of 20:53.

I stood around at the finish waiting for the guys I work with. One of my bosses quit smoking a month or so ago and this was his first race ever, and also longest mileage. I guess they all ran together and came through around 37 minutes. We all went and got some pizza and our extra clothes, had a beer or two and then headed out.

Side note - I obviously hadn't brought my wallet down to the race from my car, and they were checking freaking ID's and wouldn't let me go through the line to get a beer, so one of my buddies from work gave me his. I'm pretty sure they weren't checking them last year because I've never had my driver's license with me for a race. Anyway, that was dumb. Cheers for beer after a race though!