More to come later...just have a second now. But a dude pushing a kid in a baby jogger beat me.
OK, so I'm here in Ann's hometown of Pine River Minnesota and the annual Summerfest is going on culminating in today's 5k race. I was hoping to win and looking around at the starting line I noticed only one guy that looked like he might give me a hard time. But when we lined up he had his 18 month old son in a baby jogger so I was even more confident.
So the gun goes off and we're running into a pretty good headwind. I tucked in behind a couple guys from the local cross country team that, like all high school guys, were probably going out too fast. After about a half mile it was just me and Baby Jogger Dude with him maintaining about a ten second lead on me. Every time I'd start to close the gap he'd look back and pick it up a bit. I figured at this point that the guy was quite a bit better than me and was running just fast enough to win. We came to about a mile long section of rocky dirt road and I was hopeful that it might really slow down the baby jogger. No luck, but the guy was pulling me to a pretty decent 5k time.
Mile splits were off the whole way (.93 on my garmin for the first mile). By mile 2 I was sure the course was going to be about 2.96 miles. However, when I got to the 3 mile marker I could see the finish line up ahead and it was the longest point one in history. Turned out to be .21! So the course turned out to be almost exactly 3.1. All's well that ends well.
I'm pretty happy with the 17:05 especially after a 17 miler yesterday and a totally irresponsible, but really fun, 17th Anniversary dinner out with Ann last night. Talked to the guy who won for a while after and it turns out he ran a 15:50 5k yesterday sans baby jogger so I guess I never had a chance.
We are heading down to Minneapolis tomorrow before our flight home on Tuesday. We plan to stop at the boyhood home/museum of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh in the town of Little Falls on the way. | 