St. Patty's Day Dash

The weeks went by and Kyle and I upped our mileage about .2 miles at a time. Well, to be fair, I should say I upped my mileage .2 miles at a time. Kyle was running 5.5 miles just for fun on Sundays for weeks before all of this began. Anyway, I was up to 3.2 (extremely painful, and ridiculously slow) miles when the St. Patty's Day Dash rolled around.

Traditionally (for the last 24 years) this was a 5k (3.1 mile) run down the viaduct. THIS year a brand new, great fun, wonderfully different route had been chosen. And guess what! This is so exciting! It wasn't 3.1 miles, it was 3.8 miles with a giant hill in the middle! Isn't that great everyone? We get to run 3.8 miles instead of 3.1! Yay! Well...that's how it felt like they were selling it anyway. I was pretty worried about making it that far when I had only gone 3.2 miles so far...but I put on all my green gear (except my green knee socks which sadly didn't make the cut) and got ready to head out. I looked out the window and quickly got a bad bad feeling about this run! It was SNOWING! On March 15! And not just little fluffy pretty snowflakes, but blizzard-like, wind blown, 50 cent piece sized snowflakes! Wonderful.....

We got to the starting line and found thousands (15,000 actually) of other crazy Seattle people dressed in green, dripping wet (as the giant snow had by then turned to giant rain), and SMILING! Maybe this wouldn't be so bad...

I had read a lot and heard a lot not to take a run like this too fast. The excitement of an actual starting line, as well as the influence of everyone's pace around you can make you start off too quickly and end up having to walk parts of the race. Now so far in my training, I had taken each step at whatever pace was necessary in order for me to be able to continue running. The goal of each run was to complete it without needing to walk, no matter what. So starting too fast, and the overall distance of the run were my two big worries as we crossed the starting line. About 7 minutes into the run Kyle commented that we were going kind of slow. I just thought he was being influenced by the people around us and wanted to run it to fast...I guess I was wrong because a mile into the race he was more comfortable WALKING next to me while I RAN...very slowly apparently. I didn't really care that I was running as slow as a walker. I was still running. But when I checked my watch at the halfway point I realized I had been running a 12.5 minute mile as compared to my usual 10.5 minute mile...The second half of the run was all downhill and I had tons of energy left. Kyle and I sped up our pace and made it to the finish line at an 8.5 minute mile pace! Crazy! I don't think I had ever run a mile in 8.5 minutes in my life! And more importantly, I know I hadn't ever run 3.8 miles without stopping in my life. I was feeling so good. Soaking wet, but so good.