Laramie Wyoming
5 May, 2001
University of Wyoming, Laramie
May, 2001
Unlike years past, I haven’t been driven to run and ride every race. But of course, if you run in Laramie you gotta do the Happiness 5K. And Kelly finagled some deal that if she signed up 5 people for the ASUW predict race, we’d get an extra goody bag of random useless stuff. Also, predicting a time and trying to hit it on a 5K course (without use of a watch) sounded fun. The predict race was a few weeks after the Horsetooth Half-Marathon, and since I’d managed to run pretty close to 7 minute miles over the first portion of the race, I picked 21 minutes flat as my finishing time. The day was cold and misty, so the race actually finished with a sprint into the door of the ASUW Student Union. It was a relatively flat course and as I’d done no warm-up to speak of, I didn’t feel particularly fast and my finishing time of 21:49 proved that. Someone actually hit their time exactly and so won the mountain bike. A friend, Doris, was second by virtue of predicting her time to within a second and received a good size gift certificate to a bike store.
The weather for the Happiness race was much better and I felt a bit better than I had for the Predict race. I went out at about the right pace and finished with a strong effort, but the middle of the race was miserable and I felt pretty wimpy. I ended up second in my age group at 20:49 (which is probably my second fastest 5K time ever), coming in behind Farhad of course. The amazing thing was that he was actually only second overall – outsprinted by some teenage kid. Sheesch, youngsters these days…
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