Last night, Kristy & I took part in the Ohio City Run & Crawl 5K. I have run it all three years they've had it, and this was her second time. I knew we were going to be in for an interesting evening when the baseball game I was watching while waiting to leave was interrupted by the local weatherman due to a tornado warning a few counties over. I looked at the radar and saw most of northwest Ohio was covered in dark greens, yellows and reds. But we had paid our money already, and figured it would end sometime and they would still have the race.

So we ventured out at 5:45, just as the skies were getting very dark. Within a couple of minutes, it started raining. Just as we got on I-480, the wind started whipping around and was blowing my car around worse than I had ever experienced. I had a death grip on the wheel just to try to keep it in my lane. Fortunately that only lasted a few minutes, but was followed up immediately by torrential downpours, the kind of which the fastest setting on your windshield wipers doesn't do much for. So we ambled along at about 30 mph, trying to avoid all of the cars with their flashers on, and eventually it let up enough to where people realized the world wasn't ending. We did a drive by of the starting area in Ohio City, and saw people lined up to get their numbers and chips, so we found a parking spot, and reluctantly made our way through the still heavy rain to the starting area and picked up our gear.

We hung out at the starting area, under the cover of the Great Lakes Brewing Company awnings until the rain stopped, around 7:10. They finally started setting up the start/finish lines and had us line up to get things going a little before 7:30. It was at this time, during which I saw another runner with an inhaler, that I realized my dumb ass had forgotten my inhaler. So I quickly realized today would not be my fastest 5K, and might even end up being my slowest. But oh well, there was beer at the end, so at least I had that going for me.

Surprisingly though, I actually felt really good. My time ultimately was really slowed down by the fact that I started the race near the back, and it was really hard to get around people during the twists and turns of mile one. I finished mile one in 7:22, which was my slowest by far of the race. I believe I ran the second mile in right around 7:00 flat, and ended up finishing in 21:24, for an average pace of 7:02/mi. This put me in 8th place out of 42 runners in the men 20-29 category (in my final appearance in this category), and 42nd overall out of the 271 runners who competed. My time was about 50 seconds slower than last year's race, and 9 second slower than my time from 2 years ago, but I was content. I was just happy to be able to run well without my inhaler. Somedays my body is cool with that, other days it's not.

Kristy also ran, and beat her time from last year almost by a full minute, so she was very happy. Afterwards, we went back to the car and changed into some slightly less stinky clothes, and headed up to the Bier Markt. We stood around forever waiting to get our 25 cent Labatt Blue draft, but after seeing the keg was empty and there were about 100 people waiting, we ended up just buying beers. I picked up a Bells Oberon, which was the first time I'd had it on draft and surprisingly I did not enjoy it as much as the 6-pack of bottles I had of it last month. I resisted the urge to order one of my new favorite beers, the Gulden Draak (which I had for the first time last weekend on draft at the North End in Hudson and loved), as it's 10.5% alcohol content might have made it an early night for me. We ended up meeting Kyle and Erika, and a few of their friends and family and hung out for a few hours, between Bier Markt and the Garage Bar, and had a really good time. It was well worth the crap we went through to get there.

Labels: 5k, Ohio City, running

This entry was posted by Brad, on Sunday, June 22, 2008. You can leave your response.