Sunday, March 10, 2013

Glendale Downtown Dash 5K

I really liked this race. Mostly because it was literally 5 blocks from home. I woke up, got dressed, and walked to the starting line. Very cool.

I was wearing a Disney Tri Team jersey, and some guy before the race wearing a Vineman T-shirt came up and asked me "are you still doing Tris?" I thought this was odd- did I look like a former triathlete? Did he think I was retired or something? Whatever. He did ask me if I had any races on the calendar, so I was glad I was able to say I was doing Ironman Cozumel.

The course itself was very flat, and was essentially 3 different out-and-back loops. This meant we were never more than 1/2 mile from the start and made the whole race seem very short and fast. We ran through the Americana shopping plaza, which is a pretty nice area but they didn't have the dancing fountains going. That would have been cool.

The mile markers were large fabric flags hanging from metal gates (like ski gates, not fence gates.) When I saw Mile 1, it seemed perfectly natural to run through the gate brushing under the flag. Except as it turns out, the markers weren't fabric. They were some form of really hard posterboard which I smashed my head against. I felt like an idiot and had a headache for the next 2.1 miles.

The online course map left out an important quarter-mile spurt PAST the finish line and then back again, so I thought I was having an amazingly fast pace as I started sprinting towards what I thought was the final couple hundred yards. I should have known better, and so I was a bit burned out for the last half-mile.

Still, overall it was a really good race. Radio Disney was there playing music and generating lots of family-friendly energy the way only Disney can do, and the whole thing just had a nice vibe to it. Will do it again.

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