Reindeer Run - pain free!

Well, calf pain free anyway!! I had a great weekend with my lovely daughter. She tagged along Sunday morning at the Austin Reindeer run, and played photographer!

Here I am with requisite antlers!

The weather was perfect!! High 40's - just a slight breeze and no rain! Overcast the whole race...The course was a out and back - around 215 finishers so it was a nice, small race. Donated a stuffed animal for the Toys for Tots campaign and registered - SO glad I read the race info, since they only allowed timed runners till 8:30!

Santa was really tall!!!!

Megs is NOT a morning person, but luckily the start time was 9am...more races should do this since it's no longer 100 degs out! We lined up and although I thought I was starting pretty far back, it only took about 5 seconds to cross the line. My goal was to try and get under a 10 min/mile pace, a full two minutes per mile faster than I ran at Decker last weekend. What I love about running the 5K is that although it's painful to run as hard as I usually do, you know it's only 3 miles and some change. This was an out and back course, which I decided I really love. You can see a lot of the other runners coming back towards you when you run as slow as I am right now! Better for girl watching!

The course was on Camp Mabry, a National Guard training camp smack dab in the middle of Austin. The course wound around the parade field and then took a slight downhill. That was just before the one decent sized hill, which I motored up pretty well....it took us up to the turnaround, and then we of course got to run DOWN it, which I loved of course. My quads are in awesome shape, so downhills are easy for me. I had no pain whatever from my calf, so I was really really excited about that. All I was really concentrating on was breathing and people watching. There were a lot of cute costumes! I got "chicked" at about mile 2 by another runner wearing her orange Decker Challenge tech t (as I was) and try as I could I was not able to keep up with her. It did help me run a negative split my last mile though! According to the Garmin, my splits were 10:02, 10:02 and 9:33 - total time 29:37. I was so happy to see that finish line! I had NO sprint left in me, it was all I could do to hold that pace at the end. I was pumped to come in under 30 minutes! And at a 9:32 avg pace! I ran into Scottydog from the Runner's World Beginners forum and we had a nice chat after the race. Man, that guy runs - it was his THIRD race that weekend and 73rd this year!

My half marathon training group (Austin Fit) runs at a 10:30 pace, so I think this weekend I will finally be able to run with them again! I picked up my tech t from them Saturday - I volunteered at the marathon group benchmark run - and it is AWESOME!! Asics brand - really nice racing singlet. Pics to come!

Megs shot some video of my crossing the finish line that I will post soon! Here I am in orange of course:

I was so glad to see Santa!