Toughest 10K

HA! Well, so much for me keeping up blogging. But, I do plan to post race reports & here's one:

The Toughest 10K - Kemah edition.
(Which has always been the only addition, but race director extraordinaire Robby Sabban has now created a 10K over the Galveston Causeway which has been dubbed Toughest 10K - Galveston.)

Price & swag:
This 10K was a bargain at $35 and in Robby fashion would include a technical fabric shirt and hat! Plus, medals to all - yeah! (All about the bling!)

Previously in the year, I had mentioned to some friends that I'd like to run the Kemah bridge, but let's just save the entry fee, do it on our own & go eat at one of the restaurants with the savings. That was before I found out it's one of Robby's races. I didn't know anyone else doing it, so was glad I signed up for the race since I have wanted to run that bad boy. (Not necessarily 4 times.)

Pre-race:
Parking was free in the Kemah lots, which was a nice bonus. I started talking to the man parked next to me, Gerald. It was his first time running a road race in 20 years, so he was pretty nervous! I continued to see Gerald through the morning and also ran into Diane and Terry from Houston Fit. Aside from that, there were ~850 strangers.

RUN!
That was more runners than I expected, which made it nice for this race. We spread out across the streets of Kemah on our way over to the bridge and were never congested. And there were always lots of runners to look at both in front and behind.

I have never run that bridge before and found it quite intimidating. I had initally thought the 2 passes meant you go over the bridge and then back over, crossing twice. Oh no....silly Anna...that's only one pass. You do that loop twice, crossing the bridge FOUR times.

Pass #1
As I was going up the first time I thought DAAAAMMMMNNNN!!! It was one hella of incline! Made the Fred Hartman look easy and Mt TCJester seem like a speed bump. Was pretty windy too -- on the way down my right contact lens was moving around in my eye. As I was coming off the first pass, I saw Terry across the way starting his second. A minute or so later the leader, John Yoder, went blasting past. He finished in under 40 minutes.

Pass #2
Coming off the bridge, the course circles around underneath. It was nice to be flat, but DANG the fish smell was strong! Normally it wouldn't bother me so much. But normally I wouldn't be tackling my personal Everest...
I walked a lot of the second pass. And it was less of an incline coming this way.

Pass #3

Coming off the bridge, the course either goes back around a big parking lot and underneath the bridge to do the second loop or off to the right to circle through Kemah and back to the boardwalk to finish.

I was glad there were mostly people still running with just a few runners that completely lapped me.
Going back up that bridge again was TOUGH. TOUGH.

Pass #4

I was pleased to see that I wasn't at the end of the pack. But going back across this time I took an extra walk break that ended up being very extended. I should have been running. Finally I had a little internal conversation/yell match with myself and got back in the race. I probably lost 3-5 minutes. Running is so mental!

The end

I was quite annoyed to see we had to go to the right and through all of Kemah before going back to the boardwalk. Even thought this was just around a quarter of a mile, that's FAR at this point!

I did set a reasonable goal for myself & finished about 13 miutes under that goal. Yeah! Still not bragging-time, but I was good with it.
Although on the way home, I was thinking I still had a little energy left, so I could have hit it a little harder....

Post-race:

Peter, "The Other Brother" was the DJ, so music was good. There were the promised ice cream bars, fruit, cereal & honey milk. Koala was doing massages. A nice small post-race. No hot foods, but this was 'just' a 10K.

Well that's kind of a crappy race report. Hopefully I'll get back into blogging and the ones in the future will be better :)