Monument Ave 10K... with a little help from my friend!

Today was race day. Earlier this week I received FB mail from Kelly, a friend of mine from HS, encouraging me to go ahead with race whether or not I had prepared like I should. The gist of it was "if I have to drive my butt up to Richmond to do it with you, I'd be more than happy to"... Who could say no to that? Not only did I have someone to walk with me, but I got to catch up with a great girl that I hadn't seen in ages. I was in...

Last night Kelly came up and we chatted, gossiped, and reminisced. I think we figured out that it had been like 6 1/2 years since we saw each other last. She's in school getting her PhD in physical therapy, so she came up after classes and got into Richmond in the evening. We tried to figure out our gameplan for parking and arrival times (it is a huge event with over 37,000 runners), and then off to bed...

Bright and early we headed downtown. We were fortunate to find a spot pretty easily and so we had some time to kill in the cold. But it was a lovely sunny day here and we warmed up soon enough. We walked the most of it, but jogged a few little stretches to justify our wave (It was a jog/walkers wave -- 90 to 100 min). There were a couple of times that I thought I couldn't go further, but walking with Kelly helped pass the time.

With all of the people I knew running today, I was surprised that we didn't see any of them. But we did see my friend Lydia at the end and she took this picture for us...

So, before I started training, I had hoped that I would finish in 90 minutes (averaging about 15 min miles...). We all know how my training went (it fizzled) and so I was pretty pleased when I finished in 1:40:08 (averaging 16.1 min miles). And considering that my 8K time was 1:26, I did pretty well...

So now the question is... when is the next race??