The Double

I did a somewhat rare double this weekend by following up Saturday's bike race with a 5k run this morning at Crystal Lake Park. The Aid to Ecuador 5k was held to raise money to purchase medical supplies for UIUC med students to bring on an upcoming humanitarian trip to Ecuador. The event was pretty low key with a fairly small turnout. In fact there appeared to be maybe a dozen people there who weren't themselves medical students.

There were two badasses in the race who appear to be U of I runners. They, of course, blew everyone away. There were a handful of people (as there are at every 5k) who sprinted the first half mile and then slowed to a crawl. After I worked my way around these people I didn't really see anyone else the remaining 2.5 miles. The two leaders were literally out of sight by this point.

The mile markers were a little off, which caused some confusion, but I ran a decent time of 19:25 for third place, over three minutes behind the two leaders, and over two minutes ahead of the next runner. I would have liked to have run faster, but being completely alone made it a little more challenging. A little while after that next guy finished I looked up to see Melissa closing in on the finishing line. She finished fifth overall, and was the first woman to finish.

We stuck around after the race to pick up awards in the form of gift certificates to local restaurants. Then we ran the mile and a half back home. Melissa then went out and ran for another hour. That girl's a running fool.