Race results

The race Saturday was a lot of fun, and I did pretty well. As you recall from the previous post, I had set 3 goals for myself: Finish under 32, finish sub-30, and finish sub-28. Well, I met 2 of the 3 goals!

I had some issues with my watch - mostly user error. As we went through the start, I started my watch (or so I thought), 3 seconds later I had my Nano/Nike+ started, and proceeded to dodge the lovely groups of walkers that decide to walk in a row. After about a minute, I glance at my watch, just out of habit and I see 9:08. I'm thinking, I haven't been running for 9 minutes already, I'm not even a quarter of a mile from the start... Then it hits me, I hit the Mode button rather than the Start button. So I scroll through all 6 modes until I get to the stopwatch and start it (I have a G-shock, and I have used this watch for all my races I've done in the past 6 years, as well as SCUBA diving to keep track of my bottom time).

My times:
Clock time - 31:31
Nano/Nike+ time - 29:59
Watch time - 28:36

Unfortunately, my "official" time is 31:31. The race was just a small hometown race (even though this year marked the races 30th year), so there were no timing chips. This meant when they generate your race time, it is from the time the gun goes off to when you cross the finish line.

I am not happy with this system, since it took me a good 2 minutes to get to the start. There were only about 500 people in the race, but the road we started on was just a narrow 2 lane downtown road, which squished everyone to one lane 2/10ths of the way into the race (bottleneck, much?) Once we got through that, and dodging all the walkers, it was smooth sailing. Overall, I thought the race was well organized, and the crowd support was pretty decent for a night time race.

So, because of all the timing "errors", I am declaring my Personal Official Race Time of 29:56. That accounts for the 2 minutes for the lag in the start of the race, the 1.5 minutes of stopwatch fiasco, and 3 seconds it took to start my Nano/Nike+. Jon finished in 27:34 (or something around that), so he did fantastic! I tried keeping up with him in the beginning, but the first hill and the cold got to me at first - I didn't warm up enough either.

My next race is a 5k on Nov. 14. This one is more hilly, so I'm hoping to at least finish in the same amount of time...