2010 Freihofer's Run for Women

Good morning everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was SUPER busy! So I finally have a chance to get to bloggin’. Yes! This weekend I had a 5K and a concert at SPAC to go to, so it was was really fun! Lets start out with Friday.

Friday I wanted to have a low key evening since I was running the Freihofer’s in the morning. I had dinner with Chris and we had my pasta salad (he loved it), and some Veggie Dogs, so that was good! I didn’t take any photos because I was pretty much just being lazy. But I also had one two many glasses of Carménère and some chocolate and coconut gelato from Crisan (it tasted just like a Mounds, amazing!) and some food from a couple of First Friday events…so I probably consumed too many calories on Friday night. I just think of it as Fuel. 😉

Saturday I had to get up early to get some breakfast before the race. I had a whole wheat bagel thin with peanut butter and some cherries. Not too heavy, so it was just right. Then we headed down to the race!

This was my second time running in the Freihofer’s. My first time was last year and it was also my very first 5K ever!

I love this race because it’s only for women and it makes me feel very empowered to be running along side so many other strong ladies!! My younger cousins were also running and so was my good friend Marcie.

We hung out and socialized for a while and I didn’t even do much warming up…blah. But then it was time to head to the start! Chris was in charge of my camera so he got some cool shots of the starting line! A over 3500 women were running today, along with some Olympic elites!

The course is kind of similar to the Workforce Team Challenge, but its shorter, since this is a 5K and the Workforce Challenge is a 3.5 mile race. It takes you up Madison Avenue and through Washington Park. I love that the hill up Madison is first because you get it over with in the beginning! 🙂

It was kind of hard to run through all these people, and I actually passed a lot of them! I started out pretty strong but wanted to conserve some energy for the end, since I remember how dead I felt at the end of the Workforce Challenge. I think my tactic worked! I felt pretty good throughout the whole thing! The end was pretty brutal since I picked it up for the last mile and booked it from Lark Street down. It was SUCH a good feeling to finish strong! I even felt a little nauseous from the humidity. 🙁 It was so hot and humid.

Chris got this awesome shot of me running toward the finish line!! We decided that I look like a real runner!

Let me just say how much I love having my Garmin during races. Since usually its hard to start running right away in the beginning of the race because there are so many people, I start my watch as soon as I start running. It works pretty well, since it usually matches the course perfect. According to my Garmin, I crossed the finish line in 27 minutes and 18 seconds. 🙂 The exact same time as my SPAC Rock & Run time. How’s that for consistency?!

Here are my Garmin Stats:
Total Distance: 3.16 miles
Elasped Time: 27:18:68
Average Pace: 8:38/mile
Average Speed: 6.9 mph
Calories Burned: 372

Splits:
Mile 1: 9:17
Mile 2:  8:46
Mile 3: 8:21
Mile .16: 0:52

I’m so glad I finished this race strong! But after going down the hill at the end I felt like I ran out of gas! But I kept going.

Here are my official stats from the Freihofer’s results page:
Place: 730 out of 3,521
Div/Total: 94/403 (I think this might be results for my age group? I’m not sure.)
Nettime: 27:26
Pace: 8:50
Time: 27:52.1

Obviously, these don’t match up with Garmin, so I’m going with my Garmin stats. 🙂

After the race I was so hot..I watched some people cross the finish line and saw Marcie go running by! Go Marcie! She finished in 34 minutes! She did awesome! She came and met up with us and we were both dying.

But inside, we felt great. 🙂

After the race, Amanda spotted me! It was so cool to meet a fellow blogger! She was really sweet! And she did a great job in the race as well! Go Amanda!!!

So after I met up with everyone and congratulated them we went over to the refreshment booth and I grabbed an apple and a mini donut. The apple was really good, the donut, not so much!!!

So I had to head home after the race to get ready to go see Dave Matthews Band at SPAC! I also proceeded to eat about 10 of the Freihofer’s cookies I got for free for running the race. Oh well…what can you do?! 🙂