5k Review

Hopefully by now you've had a chance to watch the lovely video that Matt made before, during, and after our run. He was gracious enough to cut out the shots of me making ugly faces and telling him to get the camera out of my face. I might have even used the s-phrase once, "shut up," but that doesn't sound like me at all. Exhaust can bring out an ugly side, people.
I'm so happy we decided to run for Team World Vision. A) I really love World Vision. B) It was fun to be involved with something that my bother of a brother is also passionate about. C) When we arrived at the race, TWV was there waiting with open, encouraging arms. They said a prayer of blessing over the race and the people in Haiti, for whom we ran. That was a great way to begin the race. Not to mention, they watched our backpacks while we ran.
We then prepared to head to the starting line- we stuffed our jackets in our backpacks, strapped on our iPhones, plugged in our headphones. While we were waiting for the race to start, I looked over and saw Kevin Connolly, also know as "E" from Entourage. (Later, I looked up his time... I beat him!) We had to wait about 20 minutes before the race began, and during that time my stomach began growling. I was sooo hungry! I knew this wasn't the best way to begin a race, but I just had to deal with it.
Overall the race went better than I thought in most ways. When we finished, I didn't collapse. I didn't have any regrets during the race and afterwards I was excited about continuing training for our next one. The biggest challenge was this: hills!! The race was in Elysium Park, around Dodger Stadium. I knew the Stadium sat up on a hill... why didn't I consider there might be some inclines in the course? So we mostly power-walked up the hills and ran down them and continued until we came to the next hill.
As we came to the end, we could hear the crowd cheering and started jogging again. As we headed in, Matt ran ahead to cross the finish line first, so he could turn around and film me coming in. But as I was running, I decided that I was feeling really great and wanted to shave a few seconds off my time. So I just took off.... I ran as fast as I could, the crowds were cheering, I even ran PAST Matt. And all of the sudden.... my stomach started wrenching. I slowed down, covered my mouth, and was trying to think quickly about what to do if i couldn't hold it in. Should I toss it on the path, where runners might step in it? Should I run to the side, and hope that the crowd would back away? Luckily I was able to keep it down and just walked slowly across the finish line. My full concentration was on keeping my stomach settled, and running at the end wasn't going to help that. I do feel a little lame about walking across the line, but throwing up on little children would have been a lot worse. Agreed?

Next up... May 8, Revlon Run/Walk 5k for Women's Cancers. Goal... run the entire thing.