Michael Dunleavy 5K Run and Walk Race Report/New Poll

This is a post I've been sitting on for a couple of weeks. The race in question was actually on April 6. Sorry...

I say "race" report, but it wasn't really a "race". Not for me anyway. See, it all started on a slow day at work when my (one and only local) friend, Tessa (aka Tetas) told me she'd just run outside in shorts and a tank top. Tessa started running a couple of months ago on a treadmill at work, and has been slowly working her way up to 3, and now sometimes 5 miles. "When am I going to get you out for a 5K?" I asked her. Then she asked when the next one was that I was doing. 5K? Claires do not do 5Ks. You have to run FAST in a 5K. Claires do not run fast. Figuring that it was a rest weekend anyway, and that it didn't really matter if I did a 5k on my "long run" day, I sent her a list of about a dozen 5Ks happening in Massachusetts that weekend.
"Haha, I think it's funny that there's a race in Winchester," (where we both grew up and I still live) Tetas said. Winchester? There's a RACE, in WINCHESTER?! Winchester where the local paper ridiculed the decorating tastes of a man building his dream house so severely that he never moved in? Winchester that fought a new Burker King opening in town because they didn't want to attract motorists from other towns? THAT Winchester is going to let them close down 3 miles of road for an hour to have a race?! No way! Well, that settled it. We were going to do a "race" in Winchester. Well, that is, if Tetas wasn't too hung over that morning...

Later that day she did more scouring of the site, “Experienced runners will find the mix of flat runs intermingled with moderate hills and turns to be challenging and enjoyable”
Nevermind, question answered. she said. I am not an experienced runner, and I will not find the challenge enjoyable. Once I promised her that it was okay if we walked/ran it, and it would be a party (in fact, we could tie balloons to her hair and that way she'd be lighter and springier), we were back on... If she wasn't too hung over that morning...

Well Sunday morning rolls around and Tetas is NOT too hung over, but she IS late as usual, so both she and her sister, Bethan (who also joined us) were stressed out the whole way there. Tessa's family does not deal well with pressure. Tessa yelled at her dad, Bethan yelled at her grandmother, then they yelled at each other in the car on the way over. Not the mean kind of yell, the spastic kind of "okay, okay, I'm going!" kind of yell of someone who's stressed out. Oh crap, what had I gotten us into?

To our surprise, the place was PACKED, and there were all kinds of children and yuppies of assorted shapes and sizes crammed into the tiny elementary school gym. I would guess that 2/3 of the race's participants were not old enough to sign their own release form, and most of THOSE weren't old enough to earn the $15 entry fee by themselves. Oh good! I thought, this way I'll still get to beat a lot of people. So what if they were 4 feet tall? They had numbers, didn't they? I'm often beaten by people who are taller than me by a much bigger margin.

As usual, there was bathroom drama. They only had one bathroom open to runners (is this the like a hazing joke in the Race Officials' Handbook?), and the line was at least 30 people deep. Bethan had to pee, and since she was still freaked out about being late, the line seemed like pretty much the end of the world. Lots of women were going into the men's room, and Bethan was considering doing the same, when an annoying lady (who will heretoforth be called "Annoying Bathroom Lady") got all uppity and told her she couldn't, what if men wanted to use it? So with every woman cutting Bethan in like to go to the boy's room Bethan would threatten again to follow their lead and Annoying Bathroom Lady would get more uppity and the situation escalated. Then the line stopped moving (probably there were multiple public poopers), and the situation escalated further. It was the kind of passive-aggressive bitch-off that only women can pull off.

Finally they got to the bathroom and the three of us went out to the start on time after all. Tetas and Bethan were telling me that I could go ahead if I wanted, and I insisted we run the whole thing together. I didn't want to go run the whole thing by myself, only to have them come in right behind me anyway. Or worse, they could beat me. I had to save face, so I promised them that I would run with them. Nobody has to know just how slow I really am.

"Hey, hey Claire," Bethan whispered. "There's Annoying Bathroom Lady in the blue jacket and headband. You have to beat Annoying Bathroom Lady and sprint past her at the end."
"Okay, sure, whatever," I said. I was already setting my sights on an 8-year-old with pink stars on her stretch pants that I was going to show who was boss once that starting gun went off. Little bitch probably thought those stretch pants were the hottest thing since Hannah Montana. Well I didn't think she was so hot, and I was going to show her what I thought of her out there on the course.

But the starting gun didn't go off. 1:00 came and went, and we were still standing there. "Ugh, I hate it when they don't start on time!" bitched Bethan. "Now I'm cold. Let's go back to the car where it's warm and get some nice, hot Starbucks."

Finally, finally at 1:11, we started running. There were little kids swarming all around us. "Jimmy, come ON!" A petulent-looking 9-year-old girl growled, yanking on her 7-year-old brother's arm. Jimmy was already bawling and cried even harder as he shuffled to keep up with his arm she was dragging him by. When we got to the first corner, a bunch of 12-year-olds cut the corner. "They're cheating! Oh my god, they're cheating!" squealed Tetas, pointing her finger.
"Let's go catch them and tell them that we're going to tell their parents," I said. We didn't of course, but we caught them anyway when they started walking. Little shits think they're so hot, I thought. Well your pacing strategy didn't work out so well for ya, did it? You pre-pubescent little shit bags!
As we ran down a hill we fell into stride with a couple switching off pushing a stroller. "Are we going to see the WHOLE world?" the toddler asked. "The WHOLE world?!"
"Can you answer him? I can't hear a word he's saying," grumbled an the exasperated mom (who was pushing) to her husband.

"What I like to do," said Bethan, who has done a bunch of 5Ks before, "is pick out people in front of me and pass them one by one." Then as an afterthought, "Does that make me a bitch?"
"No," I said. "I think everyone does that. That makes you a competitor." It was meant to be a compliment.
"Awww, and I thought it was my great original idea!" said Bethan. We kept running, and we were slowly picking people off, adults as well as kids alike, in Bethan's totally original, patented fashion. Then, inexplicably Bethan broke away from us and strode away. It was puzzling. We'd been together for a mile and a half, there was no reason to run off now... Then she started pumping her fist in the air. What the...? And then we noticed: there, to her right, was Annoying Bathroom Lady. "Goooooooo Bethan!" Tessa and I cheered, as she pumped her arm in the air for the full minute it took her to pull ahead of Annoying Bathroom Lady. Tessa and I weren't far behind.

About half a mile from the end the road took a steep pitch upwards and Tessa took her first walking break and took off her super cool sweatshirt (it doubled as a painting sweatshirt and was a million colors and the collar had been totally worn off) before we started running again. (Bethan was already wearing the race t-shirt and I bit my tongue hard so I wouldn't ruin the day by being a running geek all stuck on stupid running convention). With about .1 miles to go to the parking lot Tessa said, "Do you want to sprint it?"
"Sure!" I said, and we took off, with middle schoolers in soccer shorts falling away behind us. As we approached the parking lot Tessa was doing a kind of whistling heave, the kind of heave the fat man makes in a movie when he's running away from something, right before he drops dead of a heart attack. "You know we've got to run all the way across the parking lot, right?" I asked.
"Oh no!" Tetas gasped. Well, if she could talk, she was going to be fine. We kept sprinting, which by now was more like running really, really fast than sprinting. There were several annoying-looking freshmen girls finishing as we came up to the line and I was tempted to push them out of the way so that Tessa and I could come through with all of the style and coolness life affords you when you're old enough to drive your own ass around. Instead I dropped back a little bit so I could cross with Tetas. We crossed in 28:13, just good enough for about a 9:14 mile pace. Bethan was right on our heels.

Once finished, we walked around the parking lot a bit so that no one would puked and snagged some free water from the kiddie swimming pools filled with ice and bottles. Bethan and Tessa gushed about how fun that had been, and I tried to hold my tongue about encouraging them to do longer and longer races with me every weekend. Then we went inside for free pizza. Tessa and Bethan, hailing from a family that never passes up free food, grabbed a couple of pieces of pizza and a banana each, Tessa grabbed the world's most enormous muffin, and Bethan grabbed an M&M cookie. "I don't like to eat anything that big," said Bethan, pointing to Tessa's softball-sized muffin. "It makes me think that it's on steroids."
"What? They're spraying the muffin vines with steroids?" I asked. Well, duh.

The gym was filling with more and more filthy, spoiled children with no consideration for the world around them. Now that we had our free food, there was no reason to stick around. As we were walking out Bethan pointed to a little girl wearing a race t-shirt over her pink hoodie. "I did that race too," said she said, ever the 5k veteran.
"What? You mean the one we just did?" I asked. "You're wearing the same shirt as she is right now."

When we got home I printed out the graphs and charts from Sport Tracks for Tessa and she was so impressed with them and herself. "Ooooooh! I did a 5K! I ran 9:13-minute miles," she said. "I'm going to hang these up on my fridge!" It was so exciting! I knew exactly how she felt, it's the same way I feel every weekend when I sit at the dinner table just waiting for mom and dad to ask, "How was your race?" And I want to gush about how fun it was and all the cool things that happen, but they just kind of give me blank stares. I was so glad that Tetas got that excitement from her first 5K. She was already talking about next time.

~~~

But while we're on the subject of t-shirts, it's time for a new poll. The Boston Marathon is this weekend, and as we've discussed before, I'm running it as a bandit. Believe what you want about bandits, I'm going to do it anyway. But as you may also know, I'm a total t-shirt whore. As we were chomping on our free pizza and people watching at the race, I pointed out a guy wearing a Boston Marathon jacket. "Look at him... he thinks he's so hot in that Boston Marathon jacket. Where does he think he is? This isn't a REAL race," I hissed. Bethan pointed out that I was all decked out in Under Armour and running tights myself. "Yeah, well there's absolutely no reason to be flaunting a Boston jacket here," I sulked. I wanted one so bad I could have gone and wrestled it off his back right then. Those jackets are hot, and everyone who wears them (and they DO wear them – ALL THE TIME) thinks they're SO cool because THEY're wearing a BOSTON jacket. Well they're not so hot, and I want one!

So here's the question of the week. When I go to the expo, what am I allowed to buy?
A) Don't buy so much as a key ring you underhanded, crooked cheat. You'd just look like a poseur wearing the gear if you can't back it up with a qualification. You should run the race and then slink back under the rock that you came from.
B) If you do the distance, you can wear the shirt. Heck, people who do it for charity or get in because they're famous don't have to qualify and THEY get t-shirts, don't they? Don't worry about it. You'll look totally hot in that jacket.
C) You can buy something that says Boston Marathon on it, but you have to wear some kind of bandit patch. For example, you have to write across the logo, "Mindy Thinks I Have Questionable Morals" in permanent marker. (If you pick C, please leave a suggestion for what the bandit scarlet letter should look like or say.)
D) Don't buy anything that says Boston Marathon on it, but anything that just says Boston Athletics Association is fair game.

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