Today was my first 10k race. I ran it with my husband. We got up at 3 am to be out there door by 3:30 so we could stop by a convenience store to grab some water. We were downtown Charleston by 4 am, one of the first to show up. We wanted to be in line early for the buses to take us from Charleston to Mount Pleasant to where the race would start. Worked out great, we were on the second bus to head over. They drop you off about a half a mile or so from the starting line, so we took our time since by this time it was only 5:30 and the race didn't start til 8. Made a couple bathroom breaks. Let me tell ya, trying to use a port a potty in the dark is not an easy thing to do, lol. After one of the bathroom breaks, we sat down in a parking lot to waste a bit of time before making our way to where we would be starting. Since the race had 44,000 people signed up they start the race in waves depending on your estimated finish time. We ended up sitting in a church parking lot for about an hour. I was able to meet up with my friend who came down to the race as well.
At 7:30 we made our way into the holding area for our wave, thinking that 30 mins wouldn't be that long to wait. That 30 minutes turned into an hour and half. What was annoying the most was that the announcers/mc's would tell us that we were going to start in a minute, which would turn into 5 minutes, which would cycle over and over again. I was honestly getting to the point of just wanting to turn around and head home, of course that wasn't possible since our car was in Charleston and the only way to get to it was to go over the bridge which was the course of the race. Finally at 9 they were starting to let the waves go. We had two waves of the elite and seeded runners before the other regular racers were able to start...over all with 6 waves in front of us I started the race with almost 19 minutes on the clock, they got us moving fast.
I started off the race at a good pace and made it to the bridge before I slowed down, which was almost 2 miles into the 6. I did pretty well for making it up the steep incline of doing some fast paced walking and running. I made up some really good time once I crested the hill and started back down the other side. At the halfway mark I was right where I wanted to be to make it within the 75 minute goal I had set for myself. Once I hit mile 4 I noticed that I really started to lose some of my energy and spent the last 2.2 miles walking and running on and off, with a little bit of pain in my left leg. At one point in the downtown area I smelt which I think was Chick-fil-a or something fried. That was not the best thing to smell (at least for me) when you have just spent the last 5 miles running a race. I finally came up on mile 6 and knew I only had .20 miles left until I crossed the finished line and finished strong.
After finishing the race I looked at my runkeeper app and it said I had done the race in 1 hr, 14 minutes & 2 seconds. I figured that my official time would be about a minute or so more than that since I had to restart after I started to run....but no I was wrong. My official time according to the website was 1 hr, 14 minutes & 57 seconds.
I had did it. I made my goal of doing the race under 75 minutes!!!
Despite the extra hour wait it was a great experience and one that I thought I would ever do.
Here's what the race route looks like:
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