Monday, June 1, 2009

05/30: Race For Awareness 5K


I Raced for Awareness in Denton except I didn’t, really; I raced for five kilometers along a cross-country course through North Lake Park because it was the most appealing race in north Texas this weekend, at least so far as I was concerned. So far this year I’ve run for scholarships, kids, the Albuquerque Zoo, access-to-justice programs, the Katy Trail and God knows what else but the only race I decided to run based on the beneficiary was the Katy Trail 5K. When choosing a race, location, distance, starting times, and friends are more immediate considerations than the charity or cause that the race benefits. Usually the cause is just a tie-breaker when I can’t decide between a couple of races.

I figure someday I’m going to look at the calendar and see that the only race scheduled for a particular day is the White Power 5K or something like that. I won’t run it, of course. 5Ks are too common; if they want to lure me into their race, they’re at least going to have to make it a less-common distance, like four or five miles. Or a 9K – 9Ks are cool. Even then, I’m going to really pig out on the postrace food to try and make sure that they lose money on me.

The Race for Awareness supports Alley’s House which, according to their website, offers a number of programs to assist teen mothers as well as a number of facts about teen pregnancies. Some of the statistics I saw on the website didn’t seem consistent (55,000 teen births each year in Texas but 80,000 new teen mothers – I guess some of these new teen mothers could be moving in from out of state although 25,000 seems like a lot) but these could be stats from different year, maybe. Anyway, Alley’s House seems like a worthwhile cause and I’m happy to throw a few bucks their way. Unless, of course, they’re really just a front for white supremacists. Then I wish the race had been a 9K. And in March or November or sometime when it’s not, like, 70 degrees at 8:30 in the morning.


I almost like cross-country. I would like cross-country except that the courses wander all over the place as the designers struggle to fit a two-mile or 5K loop into a small park, kind of like how DNA compacts itself down to fit two yards of genetic information into a cell the size of a pinhead. I like the non-paved terrain, though; the North Lake course was probably about 80% on grass and the rest on a dirt trail. They marked it well and had two water stops although I can’t remember the last time I drank in a 5K. Oh wait – it was in this race.


Before the race one of the organizers made a little speech about how glad she was to see so many people there and what a great day we had for running. As alluded to earlier, it was about 70 degrees and 80% humidity; personally I thought the weather was more conducive to spectating than to running. When I got back to my car, my parking tag for work had melted which I’m pretty sure means that there’s eighteen more weeks of summer.

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