Scope It Out 5K Run Report

This morning I ran the Scope It Out 5K (a fundraiser run for colon cancer awareness).

I ran three times this past week; during the second and third runs, my left knee was absolutely killing me, as my shoes were worn out. I went to my running store on Thursday, but they didn't have my size, so they had another store send a pair over, which I picked up Friday evening (this is why I had to run the 3rd run of the week on dead shoes). I decided to run today in the new shoes, since I didn't really care so much about my time today as I do about getting a few weeks of running in them in before the Country Music Half Marathon, which is in four weeks.

DC is a total mess right now because of the Cherry Blossom Festival (which started yesterday) and all the tourists it draws. Even at 7:30 in the morning when I arrived at the race, there were hoards of people with cameras driving really slowly so they can take pictures out their windows and crowding the sidewalks as they don't watch where they're walking because they're looking through a camera view finder instead of where they're going.

I got there around 30 minutes early to try to find the two people I know who were also running. Of course I could not find either of them, so I just stretched and got ready to run. It was about 34 degrees at start time, so a little chilly for April in DC.

It was an out and back course. I started to feel real good about myself when I passed the two leaders running neck and neck on the way back as they passed the 2 mile mark, meaning, of course, that I was at the 1 mile mark. I ended up running a negative split, averaging somewhere around 9:30/mi on the way out and 8:30/mi on the way back, (I forgot my watch...again...so this is an estimate based on the finish time and the number of songs it took me to run the out half).

It was a really pretty course, because the cherry blossoms are in full bloom (it seemed like it'd be better to put a picture of cherry blossoms at the top of this post than a picture of a colon).

When I got done, I went back to grab a bottle of water and a banana, and head out. As I was leaving, I ran into one of my friends, who was just finishing. She showed up to the race about 5 minutes after the starting gun. It's funny because she was captaining a team that her company sponsored, so apparently there was no organization for their team today. My other friend no-showed.

Overall, a fun run in a very well organized race on a really nice course.

Edited 2007-03-31: They posted the results; I did better than I thought. Neat.