Cinco de Mayo 10K

The Cinco de Mayo 10K was a last-minute race for me. Coach Scott suggested it, and I had been thinking about it, so on the Saturday before the race I signed up. I’m glad I did because they had awesome Zorrel shirts as the race shirt. I also need to do races as motivation to train, so it was either do the race or make myself go run alone. Running in a race is much more enjoyable!

On race morning I found Shari, Beatriz, April and Kathy. We chatted for a bit and then decided to do a warm-up jog. We did an out & back and had a great time chatting away. It was almost hard to remember that we were there to do a race. We lined up at the start and took off at the gun. I was next to Shari and because of the crowd we were moving around amongst all of the people. She moved forward through a hole, but suddenly the hole closed behind her and I got cut off. I moved off to the side to have a bit more room, but lost Shari. So I continued on, focusing on trying to get up all the hills. There were quite a few on the first half of the course. We ran along the golf courses, and picked up speed downhill heading towards the turnaround point. I dreaded this because that meant we would have to go back up the hill. After the turn I wasn’t feeling too well, so I just focused on getting up the hill. I looked for friends on the course and waved and cheered across the street as we ran.

At the mile 5 aid station I grabbed some water, but suddenly got a cramp right after. I raised my arms to try to stretch it out because it was so painful. Suddenly Shari appeared and ran with me. There was a guy behind us, and I fell back to where he was. The last part of the course was the toughest, but the guy behind me kept saying “Come on! Let’s go!” When someone is so encouraging when you’re hurting it really makes you want to cry. I caught back up to Shari, and we crossed the finish line. I finished in 56:55, which was a 9:05 average! My goal was to go faster than the 9:40 average at Sabino, so this was great. Shari and I walked around to cool down afterwards. It was only in the 70’s but it felt like 100 degrees out. We walked over and got some awesome burritos in the food area, along with eegee’s. We sat in the grass with the rest of the Tri Girls, and the burritos and eegee’s were the best thing ever! SAR really picked great post-race food for this one. It was a fun race, but boy did 10K feel like 10 miles on that course!