Skip to main content

Jingling the Bells in the Rain

Since I had been keeping a close eye on the weather reports over the last few days I was a little disappointed this morning at how accurate they all turned out to be:

45 degrees and raining.

I was talking to another runner on the way to the starting line and remarked that the only change in the prediction for this morning was from a 70% chance of rain at 9am to an 80% chance of rain at 9am. She looked at me for a second and then said, "Well it's 100% raining right now so I don't think it matters anymore."

Touché.



But despite the weather (which ended up being a blessing in disguise as it cleared out the course of non-participants) this was still a fun race and I had a great time running it... even if I saw Pete from The Lakefront Trail blow by me in the first half mile. He ended up in fifth place so I don't feel too bad. I think it's pretty safe to say that he blew past a lot of people!

I got a pretty bad stitch in my side at about mile four that slowed me down dramatically - probably because I started out way too fast (I passed mile three at around 22 minutes which is much too fast for me). I think I ended up around 49 minutes, so I definitely paid the price for starting out so fast.

I think I covered most of what I have to say about this race in my Newcity review so I'll leave it at that.

It started raining a few minutes after I finished and I got soaked walking back to catch the Clark bus... and I was worried about getting rained on during the race.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Pete BDecember 15, 2012 at 6:59 PM

    Nice summary. I love the 100% raining comment! I may have preferred "icy snow". At least it would be more seasonal and fit in with the race theme better. I will have to say "hi" next time we are in the same race together! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chicagoland's First Annual February Fool's Goal Half Marathon/Debacle

A few weeks ago I was looking through the race listings for the month of February and noticed that there are three different races this coming Sunday. All in different cities. As I was trying to decide which one to run I realized that they're all taking place at different times... and then I started thinking... Why not just run all three? I talked to my running homey Antonio and after some discussion about logistics, we realized that based on the timing and location of the races, this would be an insane dash from Chicago to Highland Park to Hoffman Estates to Channahon and back to Chicago, with just enough time to park, get our bibs, run the races and (after carefully stretching, of course) head off to the next one. That's also when we noticed that by a pretty sweet coincidence, the three races just happen to add up to a half marathon.  So, obviously we decided that it had to be done. We registered for all three and created a new race: Chicagoland's First A
12 comments
Read more

Warrior Dash or It's Not Always About Speed

My parents were in town this weekend from Texas. We rented an I-GO (actually, even better than that, I won the WEGO 10 monthly competition for 10 free hours with an I-GO, which was very sweet) and drove out to Channahon, Illinois for the Warrior Dash . This was my first "mud run" and I was pretty excited about it, because I've been creating an image of the mud run in my mind as a pseudo-hardcore fun run. I would say that I still feel that after running it, but I think now I see it as intentionally not hardcore. They're asking people to have fun, not to kill themselves. My full review is up at Newcity - I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected, but most of that was just based on seeing it in a different way. This isn't really a run for runners. It's a run that tricks non-runners into thinking running is fun. More on that later (like several weeks from now later, not like later in this blog post). Anyway, I ran with Brynn, and we made sur
6 comments
Read more

Top 7 Chicago Race Shirts (and a Hat) of 2012

Remember when race shirts were pretty much guaranteed to be over-sized white cotton, seemingly designed so that you could wear them once (if you really wanted to show that you ran the race) and then probably never again? One side had the race logo and the other had about 20 sponsors. And the long-sleeve ones had little cuffs at the wrists to make sure you got that nice puffed sleeve look that no one has ever asked for. These days it seems like almost every race is giving out running shirts rather than old-school cotton, and mostly I'm thankful for this change because it seems like they spend more time picking an appropriate color and working on a legitimate design rather than just slapping their logo onto some cotton for you (although I did get a few race shirts this year that went with that style... surprisingly enough, those shirts aren't in my closet anymore). Anyway, pretty much every race includes a shirt. Some are awesome, some are terrible and some are just... shirt
12 comments
Read more