February Freeze 5K

Today I ran the February Freeze 5K in Rapid City. The cardiac division at the hospital puts this race on to raise awareness for Heart Heath. I wasn't sure I was even going to run this race as I haven't been feeling very well the past week, but the Runner's Club had cancelled their Valentine's Day Race next weekend and I had made a goal to run a race a month so this was my only option. Chris drove to Rapid (about an hour from our house) and I tried to sleep off this nagging headache I have had for a while that never seems to quite go away completely. I felt okay when we got there so I put a smile on my face and figured I would try and make the best of it. Right before the race, the race director lady announced that they had 400 runners signed up for the race; way more than in the years' past races. We all go outside to start and right at noon, off we went. We started right away going up a hill and the up and down of the hills never stopped. And boy my legs were feeling it. Since I have been running on the indoor track most of the winter and haven't been doing much "real-life" running, the hills definitely got me. I of course started off way too fast like I usually do so by the 2nd mile, I was pretty spent. I had to walk up the last hill and I hated myself for doing it, but my legs were just burning. At the top of the last hill, I could see the hospital and all of the people so I knew it was almost over. In the last stretch, I could see Chris, Caiden, and Chloe and then I heard Caiden yelling for me to "GO!" so I sprinted it out at the end and passed the lady in front of me, which Caiden thought was just awesome. I finished in 31:21 which is slower than most of my other 5Ks, but with the hills was to be expected. I did learn from this race, that I really do need to try to get outside more to practice hill running....Chris thinks we should invent an indoor hill track. Maybe I'll get to work on that......