My first race
June 2nd, 2006 by greg
Last night I ran my first race. It was the Chase Corporate Challenge in Rochester. The race took place at RIT. There were about 9400 runners for the 3.5 mile race. I ran for Impact Technologies, a company with far too many really good runners!
My official time was 29:23. My un-official time is 28:22 which I clocked using my stopwatch. Since I lined up at the 8 minute/mile marker it took more than a full minute to reach the starting line. With so many runners the relatively narrow course was difficult to navigate. I spent a lot of the race on the outer edge of the course where there were fewer people to run around.
I made two mistakes during the race that cost me some time. My biggest mistake was that I thought the second water stop was the marker for the third mile. I picked up my pace there and it was a mistake because I ran a little low on steam after that. My second mistake was not knowing where the finish line was. I thought the finish line was much farther than it really was. I was planning to sprint for a moderate distance to the finish. I still printed through the finish but it was a much shorter sprint than I had hoped for.
I was happy with my time. I met my goal of running it in under 30 minutes. My unofficial time (and actually my official time as well) is a new personal record for me for a 3.5 mile distance. When practicing on treadmills for 3.5 miles I was barely able to complete it in under 30 minutes.
The post-race party was nice too. My company, like most others, provided food and beer.
I’m looking forward to next years race. I hope to shave a fair amount of time off of this years time.
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This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 7:28 am and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.