The Town & Country Run for Health 10k was unusual in a couple of ways. It was sponsored by the Town & Country hospital and was completely free, including a nice, long sleeved, 8-color T-shirt. It was also the only race I’ve ever run that took over 24 hours to finish....kind of. J

 

I left home at 6AM yesterday morning for the 35 mile drive to the race site to give myself plenty of time to find the location. I arrived shortly before 7 for an 8AM race. My first clue that something was wrong was the complete lack of any signs of race preparation. No volunteers at work. No registration/packet pickup setup. No runners milling about. No police cars. Only a dark hospital parking lot with an occasional staff member arriving or departing and a couple of empty tents in a fenced off area. Even though I was more than an hour early, this just wasn’t right and I knew I had the right location. I suspected that I had misread the race flyer, but decided to wait for awhile. A couple of cars with runners arrived shortly. One was FrankS. A man who proved to be the race director appeared and explained that the race is “tomorrow”. It seems that either early race flyers had listed the race date incorrectly (both Frank’s and mine said Saturday, Feb 6) or the date was changed to Sunday after they were published. He was there to inform those who showed up on the wrong day. He gave each of us a left over T-shirt from last year’s race for our trouble. I learned today that quite a few people had a 24-hour race experience.

 

Today, we did it again. There were both a 5k and a 10k. I opted for the 10k. I’m getting a lot of 5k’s while here in Florida and wanted a 10k test of where I am now 7 weeks out from a target race, the Azalea Trail 10k. Temp was about 70 at race time. Humidity was a bit high. The course wound through a couple of neighborhoods and on a walking/biking trail. Lots of turns, including two 180 degree turnarounds.

 

My race went about as I expected. I ran 52:23 for an average pace of 8:26. My 1-6 mile splits were fairly even at 8:32, 8:32, 8:22, 8:28, 8:26, 8:20, and 1:43 (8:02 pace) for the last .21369 mile. I would have liked to have run a little closer to 50 minutes, which is my Azalea Trail target, but I ran it about as well as I am currently capable of under today’s warm, humid conditions. I might have been able to shave a little off of the time if I had pushed the pace a little harder earlier and really tried to kill myself in the last couple of miles, but it would have only been a few seconds.

 

I finished second in the 60-64 age group, mainly because a couple of guys ran the 5k who would have beaten me if they had chosen the 10k. But, I’ll keep the medal. You win or lose with the conditions handed to you. J

 

There was a good post race spread. Fruit, bagels, muffins, juices, Pepsi, hot dogs and popcorn. Clowns. Face painting for the kids. Hospital staff conducted cholesterol tests, posture and gait evaluations, and blood pressure and lung capacity tests. The fire department had a couple of trucks there for kids (young and old) to climb on.