A Look Back: Polar Dash 5k

I realized the other day that I never blogged about my first 5k of 2011, which happened to be on the very first day of 2011!  That's right, no time for a New Year's Day hangover for this lady, although I do remember the morning of the race I wasn't quite sure if I was still drunk, or hungover, thankfully Emily handled the driving that morning!  We headed over to Carly's house where we met up with Carly and Kathy and then we all headed to the race together.  

Race Number!

Emily and I pre-race:

January 1st, 2011 was a very, very cold winter day, I believe the temperature was about -9 before the windchill!    Emily, Carly, Kathy and myself loaded on the layers and got ready to run, I even put handwarmers in my shoes hoping they would keep my feet warm, they didn't, they just made my shoes extra uncomfortable.  Emily and I had not prepared for this race at all, neither one of us had been running much since our last 5k on Thanksgiving.  So we were not trying to set any new personal records, all we wanted to do was finish!  With the frigid temperature and the lack of training all we cared about was finishing the race.  We ran our normal, slow pace, but of course there were plenty of large hills on the course, which always slow me down.  On the way to the race I had downloaded the Runkeeper app on my phone, which tracks your distance/pace/elevation, etc by GPS.  I think it was around the 2.25 mile mark that Emily and I realized that we were setting a really good pace for ourselves, and could possibly beat our previous best time of 37:41(which I had set on the very first 5k I had ever done).  Neither one of us acknowledged this aloud, as we didn't want to curse ourselves, so we just kept on running!  When we crossed the finish line I looked at the race clock and realized that we had probably just set a new personal record - also upon crossing the finish line we got these really sweet Polar Dash 5k finisher medals, with all this excitement I totally forgot to stop my running activity on my phone, when I finally got around to it I realized that our time was 37:46.  This race was chipped timed, so we were very anxious to see what our actual time was... it ended up being 37:01!!  Whoop Whoop!  So we went from only hoping to cross the finish line, with absolutely no time expectations, to setting a new personal record for the both of us!  The Polar Dash was very well organized and a super fun run!  I think we might have to do it every year.  It was pretty funny seeing all the guys with beards post-race, as there beards were covered in icicles!

If you follow this link you can view our race data (map, pace, mile markers, elevation) via runkeeper, it's pretty cool!

And we're Done!!  

And a shot of our group post-race: