At some point after the Celebrate Differences 5K in April, I learned that they would be the charity partner for the 2015 FraidyCat series. So I signed up to run it and help support them. It also ended up being the Virtual Old Glory Relay run.
We had great weather for it, and it was great to see Rebecca and the rest of the Celebrate Differences people out there. However, I believe the on site staff could have done a better job with things. For one, even though I registered in plenty of time, they didn’t have a shirt for me — and I still don’t have it almost 3 weeks later. I’ll get it at some point once it’s printed. The other HUGE issue I had was with how they handled the 10K awards. This is the first race that I’ve ever been at where they didn’t do age group for both distances.
When I looked at the web site afterwards, I saw that they had a note that it had to get to 250 before they would do that. I understand it’s a for-profit race, but medals can’t be that expensive when I see all of these virtual ones that offer a medal for $12-$15 entry fee. And when you buy them in bulk, it can’t be more than say $5-7 per. So maybe $350 to cover the 10K side.
While I don’t run races or participate in events because of the finisher medals (or medals in general), this rubbed me the wrong way enough that I needed to say something about it. And for the record, even if they had done age awards, I wouldn’t have gotten one (4th in age group), so it’s really about how it was handled not that I didn’t get one when I should have.
While those were both issues, there were a couple of good learning lessons from the day —
1) That until I can control starts / keep an even pace, we need to go to tethered running. Consistently, I’m burning out the ‘first level’ by 2-3 miles in and have very little left for the second half / later parts of races. As an example of that, I was at a ~12min/mile pace through the 5K and that pace dropped by about 2 min /mile on the 2nd 5K.
2) That ‘disposable clothing’ (aka Goodwill sweatshirt purchases) are better options in races where it’s borderline (say 45-50) rather than UnderArmour suit. I ended up having to pull off layers (Terri carried the top for me) mid race. It would have been better if I could have just pulled off a $2 sweatshirt and dropped it.
