This past Saturday I did the Fight Like a Firefighter 5k. This is my recap.

Pre-Race

I got to sleep in a little bit since the race didn’t start until 9 a.m. which was nice. I got up at 7:30-ish, bummed around and left so I could be there by the requested 8:30 time. It wasn’t raining one stinking drop until I hit Wentzville Parkway and then it started to pour! What the heck? It was as if the weather gods had just decided to rain only on Wentzville.

Anyways, I got to the parking area for the race, which was already quite crowded and had to make my own “parking spot”. Thankfully they didn’t ticket us for doing so! Then I walked a little ways to the fire station, where there were a ton of people crowded into trying to keep out of the rain. Then they couldn’t decide if they wanted to start the race on time or not…so after about 5 minutes past the 9:00 start time, they had us walk out to the street and stand in the rain…nice.

Then with no warning, they blew a whistle and off everyone went.

During the Race

I wasn’t exactly thrilled with running in the rain. Because it was raining pretty good. Water was building up on my eyelashes and dripping into my eyes so that, of course, was a total pain in my ass. Plus, since I didn’t have any warning, my Garmin wasn’t ready to go! So I don’t have quite an accurate time for this race. I pass mile one in about 15 minutes, when I got stuck next to a total Chatty Kathy. She was nice and everything, but I felt like I couldn’t just take off from my walk break, because I would have felt bad (for some reason). Plus, she was so dang NICE! Which made it way harder…eventually though I was able to separate from her and continue on. She did catch up with me, about the time I passed her friend who had been quite a ways ahead of us. I’m glad she enjoyed her first 5k, and that she had a good time.

Now they had closed the main drag we were running on, but hadn’t really closed the side streets, so people were still kind of driving on the main drag. And the course people where hollering at us to get on the sidewalk…umm what the hell? You were supposed to have this street closed down, and now you want me to risk my health by making me run on your shitty sidewalks? *Side note: In my opinion, running down a sidewalk is more dangerous and risky than running on the street because of the general nature of sidewalks to move and become more uneven, which increases your chance of tripping.*

Either way, I finished in roughly (what I thought) was 48:00. Although when I got my email with the results, it said it only took me 40 minutes to complete the whole 5k…so I don’t have a good time to go off of, unfortunately.

So no real race stats for this…simply because the organization on the organizers behalf wasn’t quite there.

Bummer 😦