Women’s Rock Starlet Challenge

DJ and I participated in the Women’s Rock Starlet Challenge and needless to say my performance was terrible. You would think with the cool rain it would have been awesome but sadly no. All the races were on Shepard Road so that may have something to do with it. I hate that damn road. Also the number of participants this year was way down. It was so bad that two years ago there were over 2,000 people in the 10k alone, this year there were only 200. Yep, you read that right, 200! 

My slowest 10K. :(
The day started off with the 10K. After my last 10K race and the first 10K of my last half marathon were so awesome, I thought this one would be too. I’ve done more speed workouts and did some hill repeats, but that didn’t seem to help. DJ and I ran together for the entire race. We did a run/walk interval of 1:00/0:30. That seemed to work well for us in the beginning but we slowed down a lot after Mile 1. It was a pretty hill course, and at the big hills we walked a lot more than usually. We had some good miles and them so crappy miles. Overall it wasn’t a great race for me. Overall time: 1:23:56

5K disaster
After inhaling at granola bar and a whole banana, we got in the start of the 5K. That was a big mistake. The banana didn’t sit right in my stomach and I suffered most of the race. On top of that some old lady was wearing some nasty, strong smelling cologne which made my stomach even more uneasy. We couldn’t get past her so we finally just walked to get her as far away from us as possible. We ran basically the same course as the 10K except we turned around sooner (duh!). It was not as hilly as the 10K since we turned around before the big hills. We switched our intervals to 30 seconds each. Mile 1 was ok, mile 2 was a disaster and mile 3 we bounced back a bit, close to the mile 1 time. I must remind myself this isn’t a normal 5K race. This was like miles 7-9 of a half marathon. And even though mile 2 was terrible, Miles 1 and 3 are about on par for my middle miles’ times of a half marathon. DJ and I ran together and had a finish time of 44:14. Big thumbs down.

2.5K Finish
Again, we had a brief stoppage between the 5K and 2.5K. This race was such a joke. I seriously think that there were only about 100 people in it. I was literally dead when we started the race. I don’t like having breaks between races, I would have preferred to run them with no break…or in other words, a half marathon. LOL! For this race, I told DJ to just go as I was pretty much done running. And boy did she go! She keeps saying that she wouldn’t have made it through the first two races if I didn’t push her but she ran the last race by herself and finished with a 12:33 pace. What the heck?  I struggled to keep a pace under 15:00!  She totally beat me. 

I really have no desire to run Women Rock again. Team Ortho, the organizer of the race, is a complete disaster of an organization. And it is showing how much they have fallen when their races are 90% smaller. There was a major SNAFU with the medals and a lot of women left the race very pissed off. I would say Team Ortho races won’t be around much longer. Very sad.

These races represent #27, #28 and #29 for my #40for40 goal!  Yay, only 11 more to go!