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5K race series are awesome. Many use the same course over weeks or months at a time. This gives you the opportunity to learn the course and see how you’re progressing over an extended period of time. The Frozen Foot 5K series in Elizabethtown, PA consists of monthly races from January through March. While you probably can’t pinpoint Elizabethtown on a map unless you’re from the area, these races epitomize all that is good with local racing. Packet pickup is smooth and located indoors, in a nice warm building with real bathrooms on the campus of Elizabethtown College. The sunshine that always seems to be shining, (at least through the races last year and the first this year), more than compensates for the frozen aspect of racing this time of year, as does the hot soup at the end. Delicious. Hot. Soup. In a season with slim choices for racing, I look forward to the series as a highlight in winter when everything else is rather bleak. The races are at 2pm on Sundays, so you even get to sleep in and have a shot at slightly warmer weather. What could be better? Oh, the price! Early registration is around $40 or less for all three races and you get a nice long-sleeved tech shirt.

While I consider the 2pm start time a positive, it also leaves me feeling confused. When and what do I eat? What do I do all day beforehand? The first race of the year was Sunday the 21st. The day started with having my in-laws over for breakfast. Blessedly, I found this recipe for kale casserole and it was amazing! My experiences with kale have been limited and I wasn’t sure how it would go over with the family, but there were no leftovers. I made this in a larger dish with a dozen eggs, added red onions instead of green, Italian seasonings instead of Spike, and added sliced tomatoes on top. It was tasty, filling, satisifed the family, and didn’t weigh me down to run. It’s the breakfast of my dreams!

My running partner and I arrived our usual hour early for the race and spent our extra time with bathroom visits, wandering around the small lake beside the starting line, and finangling our timing chips onto our sneakers. Said timing chips may be the only negative about the race, but I believe there was talk about getting rid of them. They’re a minor inconveience and worth the hassle for the afforementioned ammenities. We lined up a few minutes before two and started discussing excuses for not having a good race. They included:

1. It’s 2pm, I don’t know how to eat for a 2pm race
2. It’s really, really windy
3. We ran long-ish yesterday!

The list went on but it’s probably not good practice to start a race with reasons why it’s going to be miserable. Lining up at any race is a delicate balance of not being too far back or forward for your pace. If you’re too close to the starting line, you risk getting trampled and cause issues for the faster folks behind you. Starting too far back increases the time and energy you’ll spend trying to weave around people. It’s hard to get this right ever, and particularly impossible at small races. One race last year, a man pushed by my running partner and I in the first tenth of a mile and rudely pronounced, “Watch it, Ladies!” All we knew was that he was tall and wearing an orange shirt. We passed him about half a mile from the finish line. While I don’t usually feel particularly competitive with anyone other than myself, I’ve never been so happy to pass someone. I think of him at the start of almost every race.

The race started promptly at 2pm. (Thanks, Race Organizers! We had tickets to the Hershey Bears game that night, it wasn’t a day for miggling.) Ironically, the race course begins with a jump over a speed bump. After clearing that hurdle, you take off down a slight hill, around a corner, and more slight downhill. The course is hilly but most of the uphill is concentrated in the first half, meaning the second half is largely downhill. It’s not a perfect out and back but lollipops through a neighborhood and adds a steep uphill right around the start of the third mile. We took off without incident and I almost immediately thought I didn’t feel very fast. I make it a practice to not look at my pace while I’m running, especially for shorter distances. It worries me and makes me either push harder than I should or slow down when I shouldn’t because I feel I’m running above my ability. I was ready to be finished by the halfway point. I was passed by someone on the large uphill and I never quite caught up to him.

By midway through mile three, I felt like I was barely hanging on and having visions of having to walk that “slight uphill” right before the finish. The slight now seemed daunting. As I was running up the hill and just getting ready to turn towards the finish, a runner who already finished was walking back out on the course to cheer yelling, “Come on! Leave it on the course!” I wanted to tell him I’d left “it” back somewhere on the course before that point.

I rounded the corner, saw the finish clock, and then saw my husband. He took the first photo ever taken of me where it looks like I’m running rather than shuffling. A few seconds later, I crossed the finish line with a 38 second PR and 22 seconds under the 5K time goal I thought might be a stretch for 2013.

It was awesome, but why do you care? This was a good lesson day. Regardless of how the conditions may seem stacked against you, it’s not worth fretting over or writing off the race before it begins. You never know what you’ll be capable of doing. Zen and the Art of Running talks about letting go of attachments. This doesn’t mean the files in your email or the iPod you attach to yourself before heading out. It means letting go of the ideas you have ingrained in you, such as the attachment that “running in the cold/wind/rain will hurt/suck/be too hard. Just because the weather isn’t perfect and you accidentally mistook ice cream for an appropriate choice for dinner doesn’t mean you won’t perform well. Also, I’ll be eating more kale.

Happy running,