Terrapin 5K

Being a staunch follower of those hippie peace nicks since my 1st show in 1979 this race has been pulling at my heartstrings through their e-mail marketing for a few years now. So since 2 guys from my Saturday marathon training group were running it, I decided to sign on this year. I hadn't run a road 5k since my days of youthful vigor. I had done a few 5k winter trail races that included log hopping and crawling under branches so I really hadn't had an all out 5k for at least 25 years. My old friend Al, who is still heavily into the music scene, decided to tag along to spectate and take in Mr. Blotto, a local "Grateful Dead" cover band headliner. He has been taking guitar lessons from the lead guitarist as of late so it made perfect sense. To make a long story short we all met up in the corral and plotted our race strategy that would get us back as soon as possible to collect our first complementary race beer before the lines started to get long. We decided as a group to go out together and try and run as even paced race as possible. We all decided right around 19 minutes would be a good goal. There was some usual jostling at the start due to some slower VIP runners in front  and faster runners coming from behind. I almost took a header but managed to right the ship and keep going. Well our first pace casualty was Javier who got caught in the excitement and ran the 1st mile a bit hard as we all past him after the first mile which for me was right at 6:00 pace. The other guy from our group, Kevin was our leader the whole way with his friend Raj slightly behind him. He came in at 19:10, which was a few seconds off his time last year. The weather was stunning with temps in high 60's low 70'sF. With that came a fairly stiff NE breeze off the lake which became a persistent head wind for the last 2/3 of the race. Anyhoo, finished at 19:29 33rd overall/2nd AG. I prefer longer races since this feels like you never get into a decent rhythm. Really felt like all out even though last year my 10K race was only 3sec per mile slower, weird. It turned out to be a fun night with free post race food and beer and an extremely fun band. Relived some Grateful dancing near the end of Mr. Blotto's set so that acted as my post race shake out or "shakedown street" if you will.         RIP Jerry Aug.2, 1942-Aug.9, 1995

Making sure to get back to the beer line before it gets too long is one of the better motivations I can imagine for running an all-out 5K. Nice work, and congrats on the AG honors. There's some spring in those legs yet!