Jill: There's no place like home

For the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, my husband and I traveled to my hometown so that my family could meet our new baby daughter.  Before leaving, hubby did a little research and discovered that my hometown had a holiday 5k the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  Now, before I deliver my race report, I'm going to give you some statistics about my hometown so that you may appreciate the rest of the post properly.

1: The square mileage of the town. Seriously. It's only one square mile.

2: The number of traffic lights in the town while I was living there.

3: The current number of traffic lights

60: The number of students in my graduating class. Most of us had been in school together since kindergarten, which means that labels/cliques/stereotypes/assumptions had been set very early and were very difficult to change.

0: The number of years that I lived there after high school graduation.

136: The number of runners in the 5k

A little more background...while I was growing up there, I didn't really participate in many athletic activities.  Volleyball was by far my favorite and the only sport where I was competitive, but our school district was so small that we didn't have a school team.  I spent my summers playing sand volleyball at the local park instead.  I played a lot of summer softball and decided to play for the high school team my freshman year.  Despite lettering as a freshman, I didn't return to the team the next year because I wanted to focus on my studies.  I knew early on that my ticket out of there would be through academics not athletics. So it's safe to say that anyone who knew me back then would not have described me as athletic.  Not by a long stretch.

Somehow my husband convinces me that doing the 5k will be fun. We can do it together, our oldest daughter can do the kids' fun run, your family can come and hang out, blah, blah, blah.  He threw lots of reasons at me, and I relented.  Also, it benefited a good cause, and I'm a sucker for charity.

So we show up, and I immediately feel like the awkward teenager I used to be.  Before the race even started, I spotted 3 former teachers and 3 former schoolmates, although there were more of each in attendance according to the official race results. Even worse, I didn't spot anyone running in denim.

Very quickly I decided that my goal needed to be to NOT FINISH LAST.  I knew I couldn't run the whole thing. I'm still only working on week 4 of the Couch to 5K plan, and my postpartum body can't really handle much more.  My dear, sweet hubby said he would stay with me the entire time despite the fact that he finished 2nd overall at the last 5K he completed. I figured that was the least he could do after inadvertently making me relive the embarrassing teen years of my life.

Before I could focus on not finishing last, hubby signed our 2-year-old up for the kids' fun run.  It was only a run around the block, but she was the ONLY toddler. Most of the other kids were at least 4-5 years older.  I stayed with them for the first part, and then let hubby take her the rest of the way.  He shot this video of her towards the end.  If you make it to 0:38, you can hear how he motivated her to finish.  If only I was that easily motivated!

As we lined up for the start of the race, we headed towards the back knowing that I'd be desperately slow.  At first I thought I wouldn't have to worry about crossing last simply because there was a walking division, and we quickly passed walkers who looked like they were simply using this race to replace their regular Sunday stroll around town.  But about a mile into the race, the walk and run courses split, and I realized that the walkers were only doing a 2 mile fun walk. Crap. That meant I really had to pay attention to the other runners.

First, I tried to hang with two other run/walkers at the back.  One was a lanky emo teen whose ipod was cranked up so loud that I wanted to keep running near her simply to have some music. The other was a older gentleman whose pace looked more like a shuffle most of the time.  We leapfrogged back and forth for awhile until they both got too far ahead. Crap again.

 Next, I concentrated on staying ahead of this group:

Turns out this group of runners are affiliated with a local gym.  So in an effort to show off advertise, they ran the entire race carrying that log and empty keg.  It went down like this: 2 of them would be carrying the log on their shoulders and 1 would be carrying the keg on his/her back.  Every so often they would stop and, like a Chinese fire drill, would switch places. Someone new would carry for a bit while the others "rested" by just running.  Obviously, they are strong, but they couldn't move too terribly fast, so I thought I had a good chance of beating them. And I did until about halfway through the race.  Then somehow they were ahead of us.  Crap. Crap. Crap.

At this point I was thinking about the humiliation that would follow when I showed up last.  I was secretly cursing my husband for convincing me that this would be a good idea and myself for agreeing.  I was also having fantasies about kicking someone in the face. If we were racing anywhere else in the entire world, this would be fun.  But in my hometown, it just felt awkward.

Turns out that the last mile was kind to me, and I didn't finish last.  I finished in front of the following 4 people:

--a short, somewhat chubby, 11-year-old boy

--a girl who tweaked something during the race because we passed her when she was walking with a slight limp

--the injured girl's husband because he was sweet enough to slow down and walk the rest of the way with her

--a 16-year-old girl who we passed at the very end because she stopped to walk so she could TEXT someone and tell them how lame the race was (probably)

My mom took a little video of us at the finish.  The funniest part was, although we weren't actually last, as soon as we rounded the corner one of the race workers started to pick up the cones behind us which gave the impression that we were the last.  I'd love to post it, but the camera work was so jittery that it makes The Blair Witch Project's camera work look like a still shot.

Am I glad I did the race and got some mileage under my feet? Yes.  Was it fun watching my daughter get in on the action? Yes.  Was it nice running and chatting with my hubby?  Yes.  Do I ever want to do that particular race again?  Not unless I can do it in disguise.  And have lots and lots of wine afterward.