Tuesday, July 8, 2008

07/05/08: Independence Day 5K


The Dallas Running Club’s Independence Day 5K does not start at Winfrey Point. It starts at Sunset Bay which is just north of Winfrey Point and which I had read in the Dallas Morning News on Friday, only it didn’t register. I parked at Winfrey Point, I strolled up to the building at Winfrey Point, and despite the obvious lack of activity, I tried the handle of the door(to the building at Winfrey Point). It was locked.

I decided to check the parks building at Sunset Bay because, while there weren’t a lot of people around, there were a lot of cars parked at the bottom of the Winfrey Point hill and I did see a guy wearing a bib number jog by. As soon as I started off in that direction, I remembered that the paper said the race was at Sunset Bay so everything was cool. An added bonus about starting here was that an out-and-back 5K course wouldn’t reach to the shaky bridge.

After a mostly sleepless night, and after running and lifting vigorously the day before, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach this race. Before the start I saw a guy I recognized who I knew was slower than me, so I decided to pace off him for the first mile and then see if I could pick it up. The first mile felt too easy, which was how it was supposed to feel, and we ran it in 9:29, but the strategy paid off as I ran the next two miles in 7:49 and 7:43 before finishing with 45 seconds for the last tenth, giving me an overall time of 25:48, 8:19 pace. Which was tons better than last week’s 27:36 dedicated to keeping Austin weird, especially if you don’t factor in that it was closer to eighty at the start than it was to one hundred.

After the race I hung out for a while watching all the people I beat finish (the guy I paced off ran a 27:36 or so which means he picked it up also) while trying to figure out where to breakfast, and I checked out the posted results (which were messed up in places – they had no time for me and one age group where the second place finisher ran faster than the first place dude but slower than the guy in third place) while wondering where to breakfast, and finally I took off and got in my car, hoping it had some Insight on where I should breakfast. Turns out, it did. It beelined for Eatzi’s on Oak Lawn which isn’t very crowded at nine o’clock in the morning, and I got migas, which the only problem with their migas is that they overload you and I was only able to finish half of them, and breakfast sausage, which the only problem with their breakfast sausage is that it’s highly addictive and I know several people who have had to go into sausage rehab. Which if you have to have problems, those are okay problems to have.

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