Well, the July 4th weekend and holiday is coming to an end and you can hear some fireworks outside as everyone takes advantage of this last legal night to ignite their ordnance, er, fireworks. A few loud booms here and there which our dogs aren't too fond of. I heard that this holiday results in the most runaway dogs than any other time of the year. I'm not surprised.
Saturday morning was the FireCracker 5K and I was scheduled by my training guide to do a 5 kilometer race and add 4 miles to that distance for seven miles total. Jonnene and I headed out to join with 3,000 other runners and once we got there I went out for a short 1/2 mile run as a warmup and to start getting in my total distance. Got back and into a long line for the port-a-potties where, just before it was finally my turn to go to one of the outhouses, this young punk walked up and cut the line to get into one. Another port-o-let opened up for me but I walked up to the guy's potty and banged the door twice really hard, yelling "Get in line next time, jerk!" I hope it scared the crap out of him 'cause I didn't hear anything out of him. I heard a few laughs in the line, did my business, and went back to the race start where everyone was gathering.
I worked my way up to the third "row" of runners, chatted with some folks I knew and waited for the MC to finish up the festivities, which means we start the race about 20-25 minutes later than the scheduled start time (it's been like that for years...we've gotten used to it). Finally the firecrackers go off, signaling the start, and off we go trying not to trip over all the people around us. Jonnene started further back and is probably dealing with more of a crowd than I am. I wasn't sure how I wanted to run this although the training guide says to "race" the 5K and I wanted to not go out too fast. After finally getting some elbow room and passing some people on the early hills, I was able to manuver around a bit to hear the 1-mile announcer call out "6:51" as I went by. That was way faster than I intended and I was worried that I wouldn't have much left by the finish, especially to get the extra miles later. By two miles I was at 14:03 and feeling pretty good so I kept motoring, passing more people and getting passed by only a handful. I saw Daniel A and Martha S in front but I couldn't get much closer than 20 meters to Daniel and finally caught Martha in the last tenth of a mile. I finished up in 21:44 for 3.1 miles and I was pleased with that since it worked out to a 7:04 per mile average, plenty fast enough. I went to the port-o-lets again and then went out to do the course again. Taking the extra miles slower I still ended up with a 8-minute mile average. Jonnene had a good run, too, with a 27:31. I was proud of her for knocking out the race within a minute of her best 5K time.
Sunday was a rest day from running and I spent most of the afternoon at Mom's doing some work on one of their bathrooms. I had renovated the other bathroom earlier this year which I thought came out real well and Mom liked it. This time the job is a little simpler, requires a bit of cleaning up and replacing the toilet seat lids and putting in a new faucet, as well as some painting and some other installations. I got the faucet put in but will have to come back for the drain installation. Getting the old seat off the toilet was a chore since the bolts had rusted and I ended up having to saw one of them off. But it got done and the new seat's in place. The room already looks better and I'm only 30% thru the work!! The rest will take a couple of weeks or so to finish up.
Regarding my marathon this October, I've always had this set of goals:
1. Show up at the start and finish the marathon. Finishing is the main thing.
2. Try to finish in under 4 hours.
3. My target finishing time goal is under 3 hours, 45 minutes. Again, finishing...period...is more important. But this is my pride talking here.
So, out of curiosity, I went online to find out what it took to qualify for the Boston Marathon. In my age group, I would need to finish in 3:45:59 or faster. I looked at it again....if I achieve goal #3 I would be a qualifier for Boston in 2012. Wow. It'd be nice to pull that off. Jonnene says we could go if I wanted to do that race.
BUT I gotta qualify first and that's going to take some work.
