Longest Name Race Ever

So the Loma Linda Lopers Club 5K and 15K Race (the Lopers are also trying for the longest, most incongruent race name ever) was almost a bust. It started at 7am, which isn’t a bad time for a start, but at this time of the year it means fumbling around in the dark for my running shoes, and finding Porter’s carefully placed landmines.

All those years of Mindsweeper were wasted!

But the time wasn’t the issue, so much as it was a residential race, and Loma Linda was laid out by three drunks and a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee was the only one with sense, and he quit in disgust. How else to explain that a road you just passed later turns into the same road you’ve been traveling down in a straight line?

Three drunks and a chimpanzee.

Anyhow, this meant that I was about 15 minutes from start time while just pulling into the parking lot. A parking lot, I might add, that was about 15 minute walk from the registration tables.

I ran.

I then ran back to drop of my excellent race shirt.

I then ran back to the starting line, where they were just announcing the start.

Sufficiently warmed up, I’d already run about half the race before the gun had even gone off.

It was a lovely, lovely day for a run. The temperature was in the low 60s, and the sky was cloudy enough that I’d left my sunglasses in my truck.

This mostly residential race run up and down hills before looping back to the finish. At one point, some guy with HUGE speakers was playing his violin for the benefit of the runners. I wondered how his neighbors felt about being woken up to the rumblings of 10,000 speaker watts of power booming out some classical music at 7:15 in the morning.

That might account for the small piles of shoes near the violinist. Or fiddler. I didn’t stop to ask which he was.

All in all, I felt good during the race. I started out too quickly, as usual, with a 7 minute first mile. This was better than my last race, where I cleaned a 6:40 first mile and mentally flogged myself. Not hard, of course. Despite my running, I’m no masochist.

I even managed to finish pretty strongly, sprinting the last 100 yards downhill. It was nice.

Here’s the results:

Time: 22:36 (7:16 splits)
Overall Place: 35th of 335
Division Place: 4th