Lyndon Ellefson 5K

The Lyndon Ellefson race was a race I had heard all about, but never had the pleasure of doing.  The race holds a 5K and a half marathon.  I decided to do the 5K event.  It would turn out to be a race of near epic results.  My wife was recruited to be the race photographer for this event.  She does a lot of photography for me so I figured that she would be a good person to do the photography for this event.  She also is a great supporter.  Both Kaia and I planned to participate in our individual races today.  I was excited right off the bat in that I saw a fellow runner named Brett Ridout at the event today.  He and I have run against each other in several races over the course of the summer.  I knew when I saw him there that he would push me and I would push him.  We typically have finished within a few seconds of each other at several races in the past. 

The race director mentioned at the beginning of the race that there would be a fire truck leading the race.  He said that the fire truck would try to stay ahead of the majority of the runners, but that other runners could pass it if they wished.  As Brett and I took an early lead, I told him, "you heard the director.  Go ahead and pass the fire truck."  Brett urged me to do the same.  We exchanged jokes about this and went ahead with the run.  We race pretty much side by side for the first mile and Brett pulled a little bit of a lead.  Brett pulled the lead out to about 20 seconds at one point as I was developing some stomach cramps midway through the race.  Like any runner, I pushed through them and continued running.  At one point a couple of blocks before the finish of the race, I looked at my watch and saw the time.  I saw it looked like I had not run as hard as I had felt I had, as it looked like I was going to finish with a time much above my all-time personal best of 18:01 which I ran during a race on Thanksgiving several years ago.  I did give a hard charge at the end, however, and narrowed the gap considerably.  Brett gave a final look at he would cross the line first in 19:01

I crossed the line in 19:11, which was at about half the gap that I had at one point.

I finished second which was fine, but disappointing.  I had hoped that if I had not developed some midrace cramps, I would have held my position a little better, but the biggest disappointment was yet to come.  As people started finishing, everyone started doing the post-race visiting that usually happens after a race.  A few people with GPS watches stated the course length had been 3.3 miles.  That is frustrating, as it is nice if the distance is what the directors actually say it is.  I visited with several people who stated they had gotten 3.3 miles.  I had to check for myself.  I used my vehicle to check the distance and drove the route not just once, but twice and yes, it was 3.3 miles.  The one thing about hosting a race for someone like myself whom I consider to be a fairly serious runner is that it is important to have a course that is as accurate as possible.  It is a turnoff to several runners if you have an inaccurate course distance.  Some race directors will even own up to the difference in distance and state that the course runs a little long or a little short, but nothing was said here.  For me, the frustrating thing about this race is that my time of 19:11 over 3.3 miles would be much less if you converted the time to a distance of 3.1 miles.  If I convert the time for the course to what it would have taken me to go 3.1 miles, my time converts to 18:01.24.  How frustrating is this!  Even if the course had ended at 3.1 miles (which it did not), I would have finished in 24/100ths of a second slower than my all time PR.  While this tells me that I actually had a much better race than I thought I had originally, I still would have been about a quarter of a second slower than my all time PR.  Well, I should be satisfied with the fact my effort on this day nearly bettered my previous best, but had I been closer to the finish and knew I was in this situation, I wonder now if I would have been able to muster a little more effort to do even better yet.  Maybe next time I should have a GPS watch on verify the distance myself.

Kaia finally had a kids race following mine which she ran and had a great time.  She took off running well and got herself a medal; she calls it a necklace.  This was her first race that she didn't finish last in.  She finished in the middle of the pack on a couple of loops around an indoor running track.