Cherry Blossom 10 miler recap
This is going to be the worse recap, because I mostly zoned out. The weather was perfect today, or as Creigh Kelley kept referring to it “no excuse weather”. It was 46F, sunny, with barely any wind.
As a habitual first RunDisney bus runner, we made sure to leave our hotel with plenty of time to get to the starting area. We walked/jogged over, then made a stop at the porta potties before heading out to the corrals.
Less than ten minutes before the race is supposed to start, I get a call from my mom, who’s at the hotel with my boys. In the background I can hear my 4 hear old, coughing and wheezing pretty bad, which happens sometimes. I explained to my mom how to use his puffer, and tried not to feel too guilty that I couldn’t help him. Right before the start, I got a text that he was feeling better, but they were going to stay at the hotel instead of coming to the finish line like we had planned.
While this was happening, I joined the 9min/mile pacers, which were at the front of my corral. I kept pace with them until around mile 4, when I realized that we were getting further and further behind where we should be (33 seconds behind at this point). I made the decision to just pull ahead and run my own race. I have mixed feeling on the pacers. They weaved in and out of people, without seeming to care about other racers. At one point, one of the pacers tripped someone else over by weaving, and barely looked back to check and make sure she was ok.
After leaving the pacers, I was running between 8:50 and 9 min/miles. I was feeling great the whole time. As I started approaching mile 7, I did mental math to figure out where I should be, which should’ve been pretty simple math - 9x7. Except for whatever reason, in my mind, that was 72. Which meant as I passed the marker, and looked down and saw 1:x3:23, I got worried and sped up. I spent most of the next mile running a bit faster and trying to figure out how I got so far behind, until I finally figured out that I screwed up the math. With that, I was actually ahead of my goal at mile 8. The last km was amazing with crowd support. I sped up quite a bit at that point, and ended up finishing in 1:28:56, 2:03 under my goal of 1:30:59 for a corral A placement at wine and dine.
Overall, while I enjoyed the race, I found the course relatively crowded the whole time, since there were no wide stretches of highway to spread everyone out. I got caught behind people quite a few times, with no safe way to pass. I also found the race etiquette particularly bad. Lots of people weaving in and out without caring about other around them, people squeezing in gaps that were too small, a few people were tripped up, and at one point, someone just kept pushing into me to run the tangent. As much as I enjoyed the race, I’m not sure if I’d come back anytime soon.
I got a 5km and 10km PR during the race, and managed to run negative splits.
but hey, a win is win right?! That is surely the first and last time I ever win an age group award. I was happy with my time considering I haven’t run much in February and March but it was seriously embarrassing for a first place win.
