I ran my first 5K fun run on Sunday December 12th at the Seattle Jingle Bell Run. It's put on every year by the Arthritis Foundation & this was the 26th year. Seattle's is the largest Jingle Bell run in the country & about 12,000 people ran it this year.
I got up that morning at 4am & the stomach butterflies started almost right away. I left for Rachel's at 5am we drove to downtown Seattle and breakfast at 13 Coins. I had the french toast. Yummy! We made our way to Westlake Center to pick up our packets & change for the race.
Seattle was experiencing a rainstorm and the streets were slightly flooded in spots. We reluctantly left the cover of the sidewalk awnings & made our way to the middle of the street & the starting line. Thankfully most of the race was run on the covered I-5 express lanes. However, the worst part of the race was not the rain. It was the walkers & strollers. You would get stuck behind the walkers and have to maneuver your way around them. The runners pushing strollers had to start during last wave & many were pushed by obviously elite runners. They would mow you down from behind with little or no warning.
Despite all this I turned in a finishing time of 38 minutes 59 seconds. We stretched in the Westlake Center as stores were opening and shoppers were showing up for the day. Overall, I felt a little disappointed in my first race. It wasn't my time, but the dodging the huge crowds of people that made the experience lackluster. The biggest lesson I learned from this race was to avoid races that allow strollers, walkers, & tend to register more than 10,000 participants
Here we are at the starting line, waiting with nervous excitement for the go signal.
You can see the head of the pack running up the hill as the race gets underway.
Just before I reached the base of this hill I shot like a rocket to the finis line. I had planned on doing so at the bottom of the hill, but something came over me before that point & I just booked it.
It turns out, if I hadn't booked it when I did, I wouldn't have run this race a full two minutes faster than I ran my first 5K the Sunday before.
