This race starts in Fair Park, runs through a good portion of Lakewood, comes back around the back side of Fair Park and then you do the last little portion through Fair Park back to the finish line. I went into this race with Alicia acting pretty cool, since I've run most of that area, but I have to tell you - they found some hills that I was unfamiliar with. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it's a pretty challenging route! For those of you that ran it - what about that hill at Mile 5? Man! That was a tough one. The great part is that Alicia is a cycle coach, so we're on this hill and I was losing a little steam and she's like, "Come on! Let's do this! Push up the hill!" It was awesome having my very own coach with me. Ha ha! I got to return the favor later, since this was the longest that Alicia had ever run, so around mile 7 she was starting to waiver a little and I talked her through the last couple of miles. She wasn't going to stop running, but sometimes it's nice to have someone that knows the area to talk you through exactly where the turns are when you are getting tired.
The weather was fine - it was pretty cold, but we were all expecting much colder, so we tried to limit our complaining. If you look closely at our finish picture below, you can see the frost in my headband. I kept thinking the sun was going to come out and warm us up a little, but that nice little break didn't come until way later in the afternoon. The run wasn't bad - the walk back to our car after the race was the hard part. Man - that's one of the hard things about Fair Park races. You have to show up pretty early to park (usually in the dark), then you generally have to walk across the entire park to the race start. Getting to your car after a race then has 2 issues: 1) walking that distance after a long race in possibly bad weather 2) finding your car. Luckily we had both picked out some landmarks (and a lot of cars were gone, since the 5K started earlier than us), so we found the car without many problems and promptly blasted the heat.
I don't want to skip the best part of the race - the FINISHER'S MUG! This is the 2nd reason people love this race (behind the hoodie). When you finish, you head over to grab a finisher's mug, which includes the following: cup of AMAZING hot chocolate, little bowl of dipping chocolate, snacks to dip (rice krispie treats, banana, marshmallow, pretzels, wafers). Man. So damn good. I will admit that the hot chocolate is the best part - especially in that weather. I ate the rest of the snacks, but really only dipped the marshmallow. The chocolate is good, but it's pretty rich - was a little too much for post race.
Here's our finish picture with our finishers mugs and a group shot with some other running buddies:
