The time I took the podium!

We finally found a good weekend to get back down to Greenville and visit my parents and it turned out to be a blast! Once we decided to go, I stumbled across the Dean Batson Legacy 5k going on up in Travelers Rest SC. There was a 10k going on too, but I wanted to try and push the speed a bit. In past years there has been kind of a small field so I figured why not, go for it.

Saturday morning turned out to be pretty brisk, sunny but temps in the low 40's. Perfect day to run hard. 

I was the douche with an Ironman visor at a 5k race. Didn't plan that.

And when I say there was a small field, I mean it was like

The entire field

That's the parking lot and the starting line and most of the field gathered before the race. Lucky for me, none of the fast people showed up to play.

Except this guy

The 10k took off at 9 am from that parking lot.  The few people that stuck around for the 5k milled and talked, and I got to hang out with some really friendly people. Finally we all lined up, and the front row ended up being a bunch of kids.  Good to see the high schoolers out there, apparently there was a bunch of kids from one swim team that signed up.  I kind of got back into the 2nd row of people. 

Of course then we took off and I passed most of the high school kids. 200 yards into the race I could count 7 people in front of me. I brought the Garmin with me, but the battery was dead so it wouldn't turn on. Some young people just took off really quick, and I paced off of this older guy who seemed to be huffing and puffing pretty hard. I didn't expect he would be able to hold up with that breathing pattern, and surely some of the younger folks would falter as well. His garmin buzzed at the 1 mile mark, but the course wasn't marked at all, so I remarked that the mile seemed to go by pretty quickly. That mile was mostly downhill.

Mile 2, however, quickly turned back uphill. There was a few steep climbs to get up, and some nice descents. Even a flat spot right around the 2nd mile marker that let the legs spin out pretty good. The old guy kept his pace going up that hill and I never caught him again.  Sure enough, there were a few of the young people on the side of the road too. Then we turned onto the Swamp Rabbit trail, a mixed use rail-to-trail conversion. So it was nice and flat compared to the rest of the course, and before I was really expecting it, the finish line was in sight.

Oddly, being that close to the front was fairly demotivating. I knew I wasn't going to put up a blazing fast time thanks to the hills out there, and there was nobody close enough in front of me to catch, and nobody that was going to pass me if I didn't put up a strong finishing kick. So I just held my pace and cruised in.  Somebody told somebody else they were close to the front overall, but I had no idea what that meant for me.  I got passed by a girl and a 10k runner in the last quarter mile or so, but I thought with such a small field the best I could hope for was an age group award an neither one of those people would affect that.

Turns out, I finished the race in 23:40, not blazing but not too bad. And that was good enough to get me the 3rd place male award! Yes, that's overall male, not age group. I got beaten by a 13 year old and a 66 year old and that was it.  Well, actually there were also 2 girls that finished ahead of me as well. So 5th overall, 3rd male, and won my age group. Of course the race was so small there were no actual awards. Every finisher got a medal but that was it. 72 total finishers, 28 male finishers, and I will gladly take a podium spot any way I can get it.

The coolest part about this race is that the Dean Batson foundation provides support for individuals fighting cancer, and this time they chose my friend Susan as the recipient of the fundraising behind this race! I didn't know that before getting to the starting line. I do like that the foundation supports individual local people instead of just donating the money to research, that is a neat concept. Susan races on the Rev3 Age Group team and we've done a few races together. I even used some of her pictures in my Lake Logan race report earlier this year. It was great to see the support that this organization was giving my friend.