Thursday, February 19, 2009

This Weekends Events

As I had previously posted this last weekend I ran in a 10k race on Saturday and then volunteered at the Austin Marathon.

The Bird Lovers 10k:
This is the first time that I have run this race. It is a trail race that is located in a bird sanctuary in south San Antonio. The race was pretty tough. I went out too fast in the begining and definitely paid for it later. The course was made up of uneven terrain with holes and ruts. You defintely had to be careful of your footing. In additional I was still feeling the effects of the GI issues that had started on Tuesday, but the back pain from the prior weekend was gone. Despite all of the issues I finished the race in 54:01, which was good enough for a PR and a third place finish for my age group!!! The key to winning races is to run the ones that do not have a lot of participation. This particular weekend there were 4 other races going on that most likely drew away the other people.

The Austin Marathon:
At the Austin Marathon I first worked in food distribution and primarily prepared and handed out bananas to the runners. They ran out of bananas after a couple of hours so there were none left for the marathoners that finish in more than four hours or so. I then moved to handing out the medals as the marathoners crossed the finishline. This was a pretty neat experience to see how the people react when they cross they finishline. There was everything from the runners that kept on running (I thought this was kind of wierd) to the runners that were excited to cross to the runners that fought, limped, hobbled to cross the finishline. Several people needed medical attention as they crossed a couple of people puked shortly after crossing the finishline. I saw several runner that day that had blood on their shirts in the nipple area. I surely felt for them and could not imagine having these issues from running the marathon. I am sure that this is much more painful than I have experienced from the shorter races. Fortunatly for me I have found that Band-Aids were extremely well for me and I have not had any issues with this since using Band-Aids on my long runns. I ended up only handing out medals for a couple of hours as they had lots of help and I was still not feeling from the GI issues that I had been having.

May the force be with you!!!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Guess, what I saw on the news last week! That's right, the Austin Marathon. Any ideas why I might've seen the Austin marathon on Kalamazoo?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Star Wars Runner said...

Sorry I post under my mom's account and then deleted it.

Did it make the news because of a comet????

Unknown said...

Lol, yes. I thought it said it was a satellite burning up on reentry. But yes, celestial falling body. :) I thought that was funny. They showed YouTube video of it.

youtube