St. Timothy’s School Spring Sprint 5K

This sixth race of the Second Empire Grand Prix of races was held in Raleigh, just 2 miles from my house!. This week I had been recovering from a calf strain and only made the decision to run on Thursday. I had been wearing a Calf Compressions Support to help my calf recover and decided that I would run in it as a preventative measure.

This was my first St. Timothy's School Spring Sprint 5K but I was well aware that the course certainly wasn't flat. This area of Raleigh has lots of rolling hills and even though the organizers were claiming a flatter, faster course for this year, I wasn't convinced.

The weather was warm (70F, 21C) and humid but dry and partly cloudy. I decided to run in my my warm weather outfit - singlet and shorts and even that felt like too much clothing.

After the kids 1 mile race, we were asked to take our places at the start line. There were a higher than normal number of children in the field and the organizers asked them to move behind the racers that were part of the Second Empire Series. I thought this was a great idea and safer for all concerned.

As we set off, I had set my watch for 7.15 miles but my main focus was getting though without any calf problems, so I tried to settle in to a rhythm quickly. However, things quickly got away from me as I found myself caught between focusing on my calf muscle and how uncomfortable I felt with the weather conditions. Somehow, I passed through the first mile in 6:35 - so much faster than my goal pace that I was shocked. Had I even looked at my watch during the first mile?

My race went downhill from there (unfortunately, the course continued to go up and down hill regularly). The hills, my issues with the temperature and my stupidly fast first mile meant the rest of the race was a struggle. I did manage to drag myself to the finish in 23:10 and was told by Elizabeth that the winning time was 17:18. This helped my mood improve as I knew that I would still end up with a decent number of points in the series!

Elizabeth had been chatting with a couple of other race watchers, one of which was a father of a 14 year old boy who he had been expecting to finish in around 19 minutes. The father was beginning to become anxious as the clock now read 25 minutes and there was no reason for the boy to be so far off of his pace. As the clock continued to tick, the father eventually disappeared and we assumed he had left to go out to the course to look for his son. We felt bad, but there was nothing we could do at this time as we had no idea what the boy even looked like! It certainly made me realize that as a parent, waiting at the finish line for a child to complete a race in an area that they don't know has to be very stressful.

We did check the results on Saturday evening and the boy crossed the finish line in just over 32 minutes. We have no idea what went wrong, but at least he finished the race and was able to reunite with his father. Maybe we'll find out at the next race in the series in two weeks.

The results also showed that I placed 2nd in my age group and 52nd out of 370 runners and I should earn a season high 746 points in the Second Empire Series - overall not a bad result for a poorly run race.