There was no reason for running a Turkey Trot, other than it was free and I could ride my bike to the race. We moved last year to a new house in a new town just outside of Boulder, and well, the Turkey Trot was only a couple miles away from us, so I rode over there Thursday morning and jumped in near the front. Since the race was free there were approximately eleventy thousand people queued up, with lots of strollers and walkers and whatnot. In the end, I ran 21:29, though that’s unofficial since there was no chip timing in a free race. I don’t know how they pulled off a free race since it had everything a regular race has, except chips, t-shirts and medals.
So 21:29 sounds relatively okd, and is actually four seconds faster than the Westminster 5k last year that I actually trained for with track work. My GPS said the course was 3.09 miles, but it felt short, and runners afterward were asking if it was short. My splits were embarrassing: 6:49, 7:27, 6:41, 6:01 (last .09). Yeah, that’s ugly, but mile two was all uphill and mile three was a flying downhill.
Like I said, it was very crowded so the first half mile was spent sprinting through families and around middle schoolers. Mile two I tucked in behind a high school girls’ cross country team, but they left me after awhile, then on the downhill I got behind this college girl in a sports bra which was fairly distracting. I passed her at about 2.75 as she was breathing really hard. The route was a loop and at this point we could see the starting line again, and there were still a lot of people just starting, to give you some idea about the size of the race.
On the finishing straight I was messing with my phone so I could capture an accurate finishing time. Yeah, I run with my phone as my GPS since I sold my Garmin a couple years ago. It sucks running with a phone, and as I was messing with it, some guy yelled at me, “hey no texting!”, which made me laugh.
Here’s a creepy picture of me after the race. That’s actually the start line, even though it says finish.
So my plan is to get a little more serious about running over the winter and into spring, but we’ll see. Winter running here is so difficult. I’ve also started lifting weights with Josh, since he “wants to get swole” but won’t go the gym alone.