Thanksgiving morning was the Talmer Turkey Trot in Burlington, WI. I went to this race not to "race" it, but rather run it and help my 9 year old daughter, Melissa, run her first ever 4 mile race.
It was a cloudy and cool morning in Wisconsin but a really good morning for racing. After a quick breakfast, Melissa and I picked up my friend Amy to give her a ride to the race. Amy was a teammate of mine on the Jennipede Marathon team back in October and we found out we live very close to each other. Now she is a new running partner of mine and also writes a blog Running (Reading) is cheaper than Therapy.
One really cool thing about this race is that they had an indoor packet pickup / post race /awards ceremony area. It wasn't exactly freezing outside but indoors definitely helped. After packet pickup, almost getting run over by a crazy old man driving his car, and a short warm up, the race started. Amy was running by herself way ahead of us but I was running with Melissa helping her pace. Our goal was to run an ever 9:00 pace and finish in 36:00. She had one time earlier run 4 miles but that was with a break or 2 along the way. She ran easy and we passed mile 1 in 8:53. Mile 2 was 9:02 and mile 3 was 9:01. Then in mile 4, she really wanted to run hard but was getting tired. With some encouragement, we were able to pass a lot of runners who were slowing down and sprinted to the finish for a time of 35:07. She finished in 110th place out of 245 and she ended up in 4th in her age group of 14 & under. Only two 13 year old girls and and a 12 year old beat her. I was so proud of how well she ran and was able to handle the pain that comes late in a race.
After the race, an older gentleman (maybe 50 to 60) complimented her and said she inspired him to run as fast as he did. We must have passed him later in the race.
We found Amy who was able to break 30 minutes and take 3rd in her age group and headed to the past race area (Indoors!) There they had cookies, pretzels, crackers, bananas and best of all, chocolate milk, lots of chocolate milk! We won a couple raffle prizes and then headed home for a wonderful Thanksgiving Day.
Here is Amy, Melissa, and I before the race!After this weekends shorter run and today's easy run, I am up to 99.9 miles for the month. I hope I can squeeze in another 0.1 this month (LOL).
Keep on Running!!!
2 comments:
totally awesome! Congrats to all three of you! Love that you did this with her ... so nice that she enjoys running with you, Bill. Hope you and your family had a wonderful thanksgiving!
yay! Nice recap of the day. I am still so impressed with Melissa, what a trooper. :)I stole your pic for my Wordless Wednesday, hope you don't mind! Enjoy these last days in the 40s...
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