DATE: Sunday, February 21, 2016
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
RACE BEGAN: 08:00 am
FINISH TIME: 0:25:08
For the fifth year in a row, I participated in the LA Chinatown Firecracker Run. It has become a yearly tradition/goal for me to participate in this event. You can see all of my previous medals in last year's recap. Since there are 12 animals in the zodiac, I guess I still have seven of these races to do, but luckily, it's always a good time.
Speaking of good times, I did pretty well in this particular 5k. This race kind of snuck up on me, as I've totally fallen out of the groove of racing. Since I had Baby Tuesday, I walked this 5k last year and ran one in July that took nearly 28 minutes, which I was already happy about.
Between November and mid-January, I barely ran at all. I was burnt out from running quite a bit in August and September... though by quite a bit I mean up to 5 miles at a time, maybe 12 ish miles a week. After that period, I could probably count the miles I did in those three-ish months on less than one hand. Then, I randomly felt inspired to run again after randomly getting myself out there one morning and actually enjoying myself. I decided that I'd try to at least hit 366 miles this year to average a mile a day. Since I started in mid-January, I had to catch up, but I did -- in runs ranging from 1-4 miles.
Selfies with a toddler don't quite work out. He was busy playing with a coin-operated car. |
Sunday morning, "The Ukrainian" and I took Tuesday in our jogging stroller and picked up our packets. This is when I found out I had elected to run the 5k, and a part of me was disappointed. With wrangling a toddler, though, I didn't have much time to think about this before the race started, so a minute before the start, I snuck away and got into the corral. The start was slow and messy, and there was so much bottleneck the first mile or so. I knew I had to spare "The Ukrainian" the pain of dealing with such crowds and hills with a stroller, so I was trying to make it back as soon as I could before the 10k would start a half hour after the 5k.
I mentioned last year that I noticed a course change from past years, though those differences didn't become that evident until I was running for time. The 5k and 10k courses were merged, so both made a steep climb and climb up before a brief downhill where the 5k runners would turn around. Luckily, my neighborhood is pretty hilly, so I managed to navigate when people would suddenly just stop entirely or things got narrow.
I got back in time to relieve "The Ukrainian" of baby duty, and after his race started, I looped back to the recovery area with Tuesday, who proceeded to eat 80% of my post-race banana and fig bar and walked around the plaza. While we were waiting, we also did a photo booth, though those photos aren't posted on the company's website yet.
Doing this race was much-needed for me after feeling bad about myself recently. Although I had been running non-specifically, it felt nice to do something normal, even though there is more to "normal" now than there used to be. I think that although my past running self would throw this race into a "10k or less" bucket like it isn't significant, it is definitely a milestone for me to be able to somewhat confidently declare a PR -- not just postpartum but ever. *updating my sidebar as we speak*
As for the future, I am looking into more of these types of runs to keep me motivated. By now, I run regularly enough that it's not burning me out yet, so I have even considered making the leap to half-marathon training, although we will see. Gotta handle that 10k thing first.