Another great race with another running friend. I signed up for this race when Mo sent me a link about it. I figured $23 for a 10 miler, why not? By the time the race came around I was thinking why on earth did I sign up for this?
I made a ridiculous list of goals for the race, packed in a hurry Friday morning, sat in a never ending Friday afternoon meeting, and finally got on the road to Mo’s house. Thankfully it was an uneventful drive. Upon arrival went out for pizza and beer. Mo and I ordered 22 oz Fat Tires, her BF settled for a normal size beer. What? We were carb loading.
Race morning was an EARLY morning. We got up at 4:30 and went on our way to Navy Pier. Mind you, a whole 3 days before the race the race director sent out and email and told us the race was starting an hour earlier. This was supposed to be an 8:00am start. Nope, 7:00am. Fortunately Mo knows all the ins and outs of races in Chicago so knew that parking at Navy Pier could be a mess if we didn’t get there early. Packet pickup was ridiculously easy. We had to get Mo’s cousin’s bag too. She got sick so couldn’t run the 10K, but still wanted her shirt.
We went back to the car and both of us went back and forth on layers. I ended up running in crops and a long sleeve Nike layer with gloves. I kept the gloves on for about half the race. As we were waiting inside Mo asked me how fast I was going to run, which I had only kind of thought about. She decided to run with me so for the second race in a row I got to run with a friend. This is awesome. We were pretty darn consistent.
Mile 1 8:42
Mile 2 8:38
Mile 3 8:34
Mile 4 8:51
Mile 5 8:38
Mile 6 8:37
Mile 7 8:59 (Two water stops within the mile)
Mile 8 8:43
Mile 9 8:48
Mile 10 7:53
Last 0.06 came in at a 6:55 pace!
Overall average pace: 8:38!
And I just realized I am missing a mile in there. I will need to go back and see what I am missing. I found my missing mile. I did run all 10 miles, 10.06 according the the Garmin. And I have my official overall time of 1:26:54. Mo came in at 1:26:52 and some other woman in our age group managed to finish at 1:26:53.
This was faster than the Army Ten Miler (barely, but it was). I went into it with way less pressure on myself. It was a simple course that started and ended at Navy Pier and ran south on the Lakefront. Thankfully the wind didn’t kick in until later in the day. The wind that we had was at our back on the return, which was fantastic. 
10 Miles goes by really quickly when you have an awesome friend to chat with. I couldn’t really tell you everything we talked about, but it was so much fun. When we hit one mile to go Mo asked me if I wanted to push it. Um, yes. Certainly looks like we did. The medals were cool and the ribbon has the date on it. In addition to the medals we received coupons for free McGriddles. I honestly didn’t know what makes up a McGriddle, but we were hungry. We paid for parking so it was easy to get out of the Navy Pier parking lot.
Once back at Mo’s house we showered and turned on GameDay. What else would we do? We waited until her BF got home and then went to eat and watch football and drink beer. i was a happy Badger fan long before they even took the field. Penn State and Ohio State lost, which was exactly what the Badgers needed. The Badger game was so exciting I fell asleep during the second quarter and didn’t wake up until after half time. Another friend of theirs joined us for football watching and dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. I shared the awesomeness of Untapped with Mo, which meant we had to look up what badges we could earn. I may have been the first to pass out on the couch. This is what happens when you do that:
It gets posted on twitter of course
At some later point I was told to go up to bed. Apparently 3 of the 4 of us had fallen asleep on the couches. What can I say? I was up at 4:30 and there were no good football games on at that point.
My body apparently hates me and woke my up at 7:00am. Thanks Twitter for amusing me while everyone else was still sleeping. The big plans for Sunday were pancakes and then more football. They have the RedZone channel. I miss it. NFL TV contracts suck. On Saturday I can flip between as many games as I want and on Sunday they are so limited.
Basically this was a perfect weekend. I ran a great race, I got to hang out with Mo all weekend, I got to relax and the drive both directions was uneventful.
Thank you Mo!
