I wouldn't call this "racing", except that I won (note, running at about marathon pace for a 5k), so I'm kind of obligated to do so. My hip/glute area is still completely messed up, so I wouldn't have run at all today, but they were giving away an entry to St George, and I got screwed over by their lottery yet again, so I had to show up. This race was giving it to the entrant who had the most inspirational story about wanting to run St George. I figured that my story about having such a serious long term illness that I was 40 pounds overweight and unable to run more than 3 miles at a time 2 years ago, and then getting back into shape to run PRs at every distance from half marathon to 100 miles in the last year would be good enough, but apparently it wasn't. I realized from the super cheesy name, that the organizers probably wouldn't be focused on putting together a well-thought out event, but this was honestly one of the most poorly organized races I've ever seen. For example, they had 800+ people running and only 3 or 4 portal potties, not to mention the absolute disaster that was the parking situation (it took me 20 minutes to drive the last quarter of a mile and park). Additionally, while the course was visually nice (in Thanksgiving Point Gardens), they made us run through a super slick tenth of a mile mud field in a huge downpour after mile 1, and then the last 2 miles featured endless 90-180 degree tight turns, all on bricks. In any case, my hip actually felt pretty awful, but I realized that anything not involving walking the race would win, so I took it out at a light pace and just covered what others were doing. I jogged with a couple guys for the first mile, after which one guy fell off. I had a nice conversation with the guy who got 2nd for most of the 2nd mile, and then he fell off, so I jogged it in to finish in 19:10. They had approximately 1000 entries to work with (I registered a little later, but paid $30 to run), but gave me a 10 cent medal that didn't say anything about time, place, or the race name for winning, so that was lame. I won the race by about 30 seconds, but didn't get the St George spot (apparently wanting to run this race for FIVE YEARS and trying to make it the capstone of my comeback year, after dropping 40 pounds and getting into the best shape of my life isn't an inspiring enough story, not to mention that winning the race giving away the spot apparently counts for nothing), so I'm disappointed that I wasted the time and money to go run this morning. Oh well... 6 PM update: my right glute is so frozen up that I can barely walk. I'm finding myself extremely irritated that I wasted my time on this race today.
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