New personal best!
Tuesday night at about 11:55 the Firecracker 5K took off from Mercer Arena in Seattle Center. It was a fun race that starts on July 3 and finishes on July 4 (but is late!) and overall I was very pleased with the race.
I put together a mini-persistence of vision (POV) kit from ladyada and programmed it to say “USA!” with a small firecracker logo that I would tie to my shoe for the run. This seemed like a great idea, but it fell apart literally and figuratively. Figuratively, I thought I should tie it to my left shoe since the course involved a bunch of right turns and I thought people would be more likely to see it on my left foot. But I failed to consider that from a watcher’s perspective, my left foot moves right to left, meaning the image created by the POV kit would be mirrored. Oh well, at least the firecracker would still work, right? Not so. I really should have anticipated this but probably 200′ into the race I felt like the straps on the battery pack were loosening and by 500-1000′ into the race the battery pack was totally loose. This was awful because I was trying to set a competitive pace in the race and was near the front so tons of runners were behind me as I stumbled and tried to rip the battery pack off so I could run. I did manage to rip it off (and have been able to solder it all back together and it still works) but I had an awkward half mile or so while I tried putting the battery pack and batteries in my pocket, then decided to carry them, and finally got comfortable.
And my technical woes didn’t end there! At about the 2 mile mark I wanted to check my pace and in trying to turn the light on my watch on I managed to pop one of the pins out of the strap. Ugh!
In spite of this I finished in just over 21 minutes at 6:50 miles, which accomplished my goal of sub-7 minute miles. My previous best recorded 5k pace was over a minute slower. So yay!
Tanya and I scootered down, which was eventful, and met John on the field and also ran into Gunter and Mike before the race. I think everybody had a great time and Gunter took 5th in the clydesdale division - way to go, Super G! Tanya’s time was on par with the Furry 5K, which was good considering that while this wasn’t an impossible course it was quite a bit more challenging.