Dave, the baby, and I took a trip to Kansas to visit family over the weekend. Of course, when we travel out of state we always look for a race to run. We already have done a race in Kansas, but we were able to find an underground 5K in Kansas City, Missouri while we were going to be there. Yes you read that right - underground. There is an old limestone mine there that has been converted into storage and businesses and whatnot. It is so big that they were holding both a 5K and a 10K. And this race is popular! It's been going on for 30+ years and had almost 5000 people in it.
Although the race is run in waves (and we were in the first wave - 24:00 and under), we had been warned that it got crowded in the tunnels. I wasn't expecting to go fast. I wasn't expecting to race.
Dave and I took a little warmup and then lined up. Surprisingly, there weren't many people in the first wave. We took off pretty quickly, staying side by side for most of the first half mile. Then I started to slip back. Things just felt awful. I felt heavy and winded and my arms were hurting. I hit the first mile in 7:11. Ugh, that's not even as fast as I wanted to be going. Still, I needed to back off. I kept Dave in sight but mile 2 was just horrendous. I missed the mile marker so I have no idea how fast/slow I was going but I knew it wasn't pretty. Mile 3, things started to perk up and I tried by hardest to catch Dave but he was just out of reach. He wound up finishing just 21 seconds ahead of me.
My finish time was 23:13 which is nearly 30 seconds slower than my last 5K. What the heck? I was disappointed. I could have done better.
We milled around for a while and waited in line to get our official results. To my surprise, I finished third in my age group (35-39) out of 122!! Well, shoot! Now I couldn't be disappointed. I walked away with a third place medal and checked off state number 17 in the process.
Next 5K....4 weeks!
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