Race for the Cure

This past weekend (actually, I think we were there for less than 24 hours), Josh and I drove up to my parents' house in Jersey for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 5k that was held at Great Adventure. I ran my first 5k this time last year, at the Race for the Cure event in Baltimore, which was an amazing, grueling experience. After I crossed the finish line, I collapsed on a curb and cried my eyes out. I was so proud of myself for accomplishing an athletic feat that I never thought I could do, and it was also very overwhelming seeing all those survivors of breast cancer and knowing that my aunt Linda wasn't among them. It was extremely emotional and I wished my family could've been there to share it with me.

I got my dad into running over last winter and his ultimate goal was to be able to do a Komen 5k with me. I found out about the one in Great Adventure, which isn't terribly far from where my folks live, and got the idea in my head that, if Dad and I were going to do it, why not invite the rest of the family? Most of them are athletes (lots of soccer players) and we were all devastated by Aunt Linda's death five years ago, so what better way to get together as a family and honor her?

We ended up making an event of it. Our team of runners and walkers got together at the crack of dawn Sunday morning (5:45am, to be exact. Ugh.) and we all caravaned out to Jackson. Grandmom and Grandpop even came and we brought chairs and blankets so we could get comfortable before and after the race. It was chilly, let me tell you! Wearing running shorts at that hour of the day when it's 40 degrees out is NOT fun. But by the time we got there, all the vendor booths were open, so we milled around, got some cool freebies and tried to keep warm until the race started.

I haven't done many 5ks yet, but this one was definitely my favorite. With the exception of the narrow course (which, because of all the bottlenecking going on, ended up costing me at least two minutes on my time), it was perfect - we ran through the parking lot and some of the behind-the-scenes areas of the park before going right into Hurricane Harbor. It was relatively flat, only a few small inclines, which was a huge improvement over the one in Baltimore, and made for an easy run. Like I said, I was pissed about the traffic (leave it to me to get road rage during a foot race) and pissed at the race organizers because they didn't do anything about it. The race last year had very obvious starting points depending on your mile speed - if you were going to run it in Olympic record time, obviously you'd go to the front. If you thought you might finish in an hour, you were told to go to the back so you didn't stop up the works. Well, they didn't do anything like that this time around, and we had to contend with the slowpokes who, for some reason, started in the front. If it wasn't for that, we could've finished in about 32 minutes, but as it was, my official time was 34:59. Too frustrating! That's the exact same time that I finished the Bel Air Town Run in June...and I had to stop three times during that race!

But we all finished in pretty decent time. The quickest of us was my uber-athlete cousin Nicole, who finished in 28 minutes (my goal for next year is to do that well), and my aunt Sharon wasn't too far behind me and Dad at 38 minutes. There wasn't as much time to sit and reflect this year, otherwise I'm sure we all would've been weeping messes, but we were able to come together as a family, bond a bit and have a great time, which was a pretty darn good end result if you ask me. Looking forward to doing it next year.



Me and Dad crossing the finish line