Oh, what a difference a year makes!

LAST YEAR Megan and I ran the Olive Twig 10k in Olive Branch, Mississippi. It's a good thing I have taken (some might say "wasted") the time to write down a sizeable portion of my life on the internet or else I would never have remembered that after that race, we Knocked for Change for Obama. Because we hadn't even had the election yet!! That's how long ago a year is!

My blog entry from last year is full of interesting tidbits...for instance...
a) It's rather terribly written! I got bored halfway through reading it last night so, er, a belated thank you to anyone who ever read the whole thing.
b) We were terrible runners! (And the race was 2 weeks LATER in October last year, so theoretically we should have been even further along in our half-marathon training.) We only ran 40 minutes before we stopped to walk.
c) I made a big deal about getting up at 5 am! Which now seems ridiculous because my alarm has been going off at 4:50 every Saturday morning for the past two months.
d) We didn't know what time the race started! So we showed up super-early and then shivered in my car in our shorts in the empty parking lot.
e) We both won medals! Because it was a sparsely-attended affair.

Back to the present...we've been upping our mileage every Saturday in my half-marathon group, but this week we were stepping it down. Apparently that's what you do...you go up and up and up and then you back down so you can recover. This week was a back-down week and we were scheduled to run 6.5 miles.

So Thursday night, I made the impromptu decision to see what was up with the Olive Branch race this year and lo and behold, only 15 people had signed up for the 10k (!). 'Hot damn!' I thought. 'I should sign up and see if I can bag another medal!'

And so instead of going to my training group this morning, I became runner #16. (Though about 50 had signed up for the 5k...typically the races I run have several hundred to a couple thousand participants. For this particular 10k, we simply ran the 5k course twice, and a 10k is 6.2 miles and thus not that different from what I would have run this morning anyway.)

But there were several people who did "day of" registering and signed up this morning. So I would say there were, oh, maybe 25 runners in all for the 10k.

And guess what? 24 of those people got medals. And who would be the person who did not get a medal?

Yeah.

I did fairly well. I ran it in 1:09:39, which was pretty good considering last year (when I came in second place), I ran it in 1:16:46. I ran the first half in 36:07 and I was a little confused by that since that would put me running slower than I do during the week after work. And that didn't seem right. But oh, look at that. The first time around the course, I was simply following the people in front of me. The second time around, when there were far fewer people, I was looking at the ground and saw the arrows that told me to turn around. Which were way before the point at which all of us had turned around the first time. Which meant I probably ran at least a tenth of a mile too far on my first lap.

So yeah, I crossed the finish line and most of the food was already gone and I had one of those great "character building" moments, standing in a small crowd of people and being the only person without a medal around her neck.

Also, last year they had fabulous door prizes. This year, there was nothing.

But oh well! I live and learn. Today's lesson: it's probably not worth driving across the state line to run a race by yourself on a Saturday morning if you're only in it for a medal. At least the race pack was good. :)