First race of the year plus coming off of a sickness. My mindset was just to go and see how things went with no expectations, really. I had no idea how I’d feel or what kind of pace I could run. Drove to Provo and met Josse and Janae for a little warm up. I was not all that excited about the course finding out they wanted us to run on sidewalks along with the park paths, but I was interested in finding out how I could do on a flat course and it was better than the first course they had planned out. The race started and of course Josse and Janae were off and out of sight pretty quickly. I started with Heather and we ran together for about a mile then she backed off a little and I just tried to hold tight and stay relaxed. I was breathing pretty hard which worried me but I ran with a kid for a while and tried not to think about it. The last part of the race was a slight up hill on the Provo River Trail and I was struggling. We made the final turn(which I didn’t know was the final turn) and I looked at my watch to see it was showing we still had about .3 miles. I was trying to figure out where we’d go since the finish line was in sight and there wasn’t really anywhere else we could go except a loop around the park that would be too long. This made me slow my pace because I was fatigued and didn’t think I could make it another .3-.4 miles pushing it that much. I figured out that there was no turn so I picked it up as much as I could to finish. I crossed the finish line and met up with Janae and Josse, 1st and 2nd. We were all thinking the course was waaay short so we asked the director about it. He swore up and down that the course was accurate and there was another runner that said his phone said it was 3.1 miles so we took their word for it. One thing I didn’t understand though is why they wouldn’t wheel the course for distance. Josse asked if they had done this and they said no because it wasn’t a cross country race. What? I don’t get that. Why would only cross country races be wheeled? As far as I know all road races are wheeled for accuracy. Oh well though, it was fun to be racing and it makes me excited for the year to come and the races I’m thinking about. It wasn’t so bad running on the sidewalk for little bit I did run on it. We all did about a 5 mile cool down together which was so much fun!
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