We did it! We got up at 5:30am on July 4th, rode MARTA into Buckhead and ran 6.2 miles back to Midtown on Peachtree Road with 60k other people. We were home before noon. What a great way to start the holiday. It was my 2nd year running the race and I wish I had started running when I first got to Atlanta.
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| We finished the race! |
Stephen decided to run in his designated wave so that he could get a good judge of his time, he ran in wave D. He started the race at 7:45 and ran it in 58:00 flat. Nice work!! I wanted him to know how fast he could go without worrying that I was holding him back. I'm glad he ran his race. He was almost done by the time I started in wave K at 8:14. I finished the race in 1:09, 7 minutes faster than last year. I wanted to finish by 1:06, but I was at the back of my wave at the starting line and I got off to a slower start than I wanted. Lesson learned for next year. If I keep cutting that much time off my run, I hope that by next year's race I can run it in under an hour. I'd love to get there. My time put me at 25,020th place overall, 1,447 in my age/sex division. The fastest woman ran the race in 32:22 - basically my 5k pace.
You can
click here to see your results if you ran the race or to check times of your friends.
The few days leading up to the race were above 100 degrees each day which had a lot of people worried about the conditions during the race. They even instituted a "flag system" which let you know the conditions while running. I think that is taking things too far. Do you really need a flag to tell you if it's hot? I thought the weather was fine. Of course I was sweating my butt off by mile two, but it's a race, it's July in Atlanta and you're running along an asphalt road. I was expecting to be sweaty. You can see in the picture below that it was pretty overcast at the start, too.
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| Just before the start of the race you pass under a giant American Flag, Stephen got a great shot of it as he passed under. |
Last year I had to start in wave W because I didn't have a qualifying time and I had to dodge a lot of slow runners and walkers. This year, with my time from last year I was up in wave K with runners who were more my pace. However, because I have been training so hard and working on so many hills I was one of the faster runners coming out of the gate. With my finish time this year, I should move up a wave next year. As long as I keep moving up, I'm happy!
To finish out our July 4th holiday we went to the Braves game and watched fireworks after the game. The Braves didn't end the game with a W, but the stadium was packed and we got to honor quite a few military personnel, past and present. We even had a T-6 Texan flyover before the game instead of the expected jets. So awesome. Those planes were training aircraft in WWII and were used in the Korean War and Vietnam War.
