Here’s mine:
I don’t think I had ever run that fast before in my life. It was Christmastime and all the runners were given jingle bells. At the time, I was still a beginner and I was used to stopping frequently throughout my runs. So I’m jogging, lots of people passing me, I’m also passing others. It’s pretty cool. Then a kid passes me. Then another. And some more.
That’s cool too, I expected that. There are bound to be elementary school children faster than I am. What I didn’t anticipate was how many would keep pace with me.
I was tired and wanted to stop running. Then I looked down to find myself adrift in a sea of babies. I remember kids falling during laps in my formative years. Stampedes! Pile-ups! Only disaster could follow my stopping. They’d trample me, they’d trip, and we’d all fall down. Other races would have to avoid a tumbleweed made of a 4th grade classroom and what they assumed was the teacher, all going jingle-jingle-jingle. I dare not trust the coordination of myself and these cookie-fueled chaos factories. I had to keep running!
Anyway, eventually they split away from me and the rest of the race is a blurry lung-burn-y memory. I got a cookie and a finisher though.
So, what’s your 1st race story?
Technically my first race was a Turkey Trot with my sister who I think was training for a marathon. Second race was a Memorial Day 5k this year. I ran it as a training run until I got near the end and I realized there was someone in my age group pushing a double stroller right behind me so I knew I couldn’t let him pass me right at the end. That would be embarrassing.
There was also like a five year old girl who had been ahead of me the whole race so I had to keep up my pace once I saw her slow down with like a quarter mile left…couldn’t handle that potential embarrassment either lol
And then right at the very end I saw someone in my age group just ahead of me so right when I felt like I couldn’t keep up my pace any longer, I was forced to speed up to pass him.
The race was cut short because a business along the route had caught fire that morning so it ended up being pretty much 4k on the nose, maybe 25m short. I finished in 21:35 so I wasn’t particularly fast but I was proud of myself for having the will to keep going at the end. Got second in my age group (…excluding the overall event winner…) so I got this really tiny dog tag with a label maker label on it as my trophy. I thought it was really funny and fitting for my middling performance in a small, local “race.”
My first race where I’m going to actually try to do well will be a trail run Saturday morning through a mountain bike park going over some of the bike obstacles so it looks like it should be quite fun.