Friendship 5K Race Recap

This past Wednesday was the Friendship 5K at Wicker Park. I have done this race 3 years in a row now. The thing I like about this race is that it is on a Wednesday so it allows people who may work weekends to do a 5K. It's also always a very community friendly event. So after work I headed over to Wicker Park to check on and hang out with friends before the race started. To say the least everyone including myself was slightly worried about the heat. We all lucked out though because a good amount of cloud cover came right before race time. The park also had a good amount of shade cover. The men started at 6:30 and the women at 6:35 to keep the traffic minimal. The first mile flew by and I felt pretty good but was shocked when I ran the first mile in 7:57 and knew I needed to dial it back a little bit. However a fellow runner friend Nikki was just ahead yelling for me to keep up so I tried hard to keep her in my sights. Mile two seemed to take forever and I ended up running slower than I expected with an 8:40 pace. I could feel myself slowing down and I knew I handle slightly more. I also know the park so well it started to motivate me that I was less than a mile to go. When I passed by the finish I was seeing a lot of awesome runners really helped me kick it in. When Nikki passed me at the turn around that really motivated me to push hard and I passed a couple more runners. Overall a good race. I finished!

26:04 (15 seconds slower than last year)

5th out of 35 in age group 

20th out of 153 women  

Feeling very proud of my results