Latrobe Turkey Trot 5k

As of now, this was my last race for the year.  But, I still have 30 days to find another one...I've never done a Christmas race before...

As with last year's Thanksgiving race, I ran this one with my two brothers.  Of course they finished ahead of me, but thanks to the short-distance speed I have acquired in the last 6 months, I was respectably close behind them.

The weather for this race rivaled that of the Lewisburg 1/2 a month ago.  It was in the low 20s, just like that race, but this time it was also windy.  My feet went numb during my warm-up.  Doing striders/sprints with numb feet is not one of the more comfortable things I have ever done.

I started the race right on the starting line.  Well, right behind the girl who shoved herself in front of me shortly before the gun went off.  I thought I would be able to get ahead of the crowd, but no such luck.  As soon as the air-horn sounded, I was boxed in by a big crowd of people.  Guess I need to work on my quick-start.

My lungs were hurting pretty bad from the cold air before I even reached the halfway point, but since it was only a 5k, I made myself push through it.  I kept pushing until the last 2-300 meters, when there was a hairpin turn that showed me there were no girls in sight behind me.  So I backed off just a bit, because I was hurting and didn't want to hurt myself too bad.  My experience post-Beckley race has me running a little more cautiously.  I don't want to get sick again from over-straining my lungs.

I looked at the time-clock as I crossed the finish line.  It said 17:15.  Which made absolutely no sense.  I wasn't delusional enough to believe for even half a second that I had PRd by more than a minute.  Turns out the clock was 2 minutes off.  I finished in 19:15, which is much more realistic and believable.  Official race results have my finishing time a few seconds slower than that, but they timing company made so many mistakes that day, I'm going by the time I saw as I crossed the line.  +2 minutes.

After finishing, we had to stand around in the cold for over an hour, waiting for results.  They announced me as second female finisher, which was wrong.  I was third.  But they had no record of the the actual second place girl and told me to just take the medal.  After going through some more awards, it came out that numerous people were not on the results list. So they did some investigation while we continued to stand freezing in the cold.  And then they decided to cancel the rest of the awards ceremony due to extreme confusion and disorganization.  So...we stood out in the cold for over an hour. For nothing.  Yay.