Foot Pursuit

Another weekend, another race. Saturday morning Jason and I ran the “Running w/ the Law” 5K foot pursuit. This course was quite a bit different than the last few races because it attempted to simulate a police foot pursuit. The race started with a staged police car chase where the “bad guys” took off running, and at a gunshot we all took off after them. The course took the runner over not only paved roads, but through fields, behind buildings, along railroad tracks, up stairways, and through wooded back trails. I found my friend May from work and her husband, Derek, before the race began and the 3 of us took off together. Jason was on a 5 person team with some people from work. One of his teammates was incredibly fast and won the race with a time of 16:30. Jason ran his personal best at 20:50 and I ran my personal best at 30:50! At the beginning I felt like we were going faster than I usually run, but I thought I’d stick with it as long as I could and just fade away at the end when I needed to. (Jason takes full credit for this strategy) The first 2 miles we ran a 9:08 min/mile pace. Then, in the middle of mile 2 it all went uphill – literally. There was a huge uphill climb, with stairs at the top (after which I had to walk for a while), then a bit of a break before another uphill climb through a wooded area with sand to run on! I just about died! Another bit of walking, then I saw the 3 mile marker up ahead and wanted to really push to the end so I started running again. I saw the ticker up ahead and that I could make under 31 minutes and went for it!