About a month ago, Garbanzo say a race and proclaimed that we must do it. It was originally called Beat the Bridge but they had renamed it Reach the Bridge. (We found out they did that to lessen the competition since you re tehnically racing yourself and not others. Whatever.)

So we decided to do it. I had just started road running again, and figured it would be a good goal.

Until today, I had not run 5 miles since maybe college. The furthest I got over the past month was 4 miles, but I figures close enough. I knew I could go the fifth if I just tried.

I started the run at 8am. The bridge lifted at 9am, and I was getting sick of standing around waiting for my time to come up so I could start. I forgot how motivating it is to run with people. I’m competitive, so having someone to chase is motivating. And I quickly found two people running nearly my pace who I could chase. They started about 5 minutes ahead of me.  I should mention that I caught both of them during the last mile.  That was a nice feeling.

And, at the 3.5 mile mark, two gay men were scoring runners as they were going by.  The women in front of me that had been running but had just started walking got a 4.5.  I got a 9.5.  Those guys made me laugh as I went by which was a good point to get a chuckle.

With the excepion of the first quarter mile and last half mile, the race is entirely downhill…according to my iPhone app, the start was at elevation 722 feet. At the almost 4 mile mark, we were down to 125 feet.

In the end, I ran it in 37 minutes and 38 seconds. I won’t complain. As I told someone, maybe I should run downhill all of the time. Makes me look faster than I usually am!