Saturday I ran the Snowball Series 5 Mile Race again (last year it was on New Year’s Day). This is my recap of how things went.

Friday-I picked up my bib and swag. I paid extra for the quarter zip top, but I’m not super thrilled with it. I guess I was thinking that it was going to be more fleece-like? Instead it is more like tech material. Perhaps I didn’t read the description carefully enough. I also chose the mesh beanie as my swag for the race (there were three different options), and I do like the feel and construction of that.

Saturday-The race doesn’t start until 9 a.m., which is fine because it was freaking cold! I wore a pair of cropped Wunderunders, tall ProCompression socks, a pair of tech fleece leggings by lululemon, a swiftly tank, an Under Armour base, a Nike base, and then a Nike zip up thermal top. Plus gloves, a Buff for my neck and face, and a North Face knitted hat with fleece around the inside. More than I have EVER worn for any race.

So I haven’t run much at all over the last half of the year and hadn’t run since the Santa’s North Pole Dash 5k at the beginning of December when I started running again this past week so I wasn’t expecting anything miraculous to happen out there.

I did my usual pre-race routine of using the bathroom and so mild stretching, almost doing anything to avoid standing still. Pretty sure there was some frozen pee on the floor of the porta-potty that I used. The race started about 3 minutes late, and the course was slightly different this year. Last years course measured 5.07 miles on my Garmin and this year it measured 4.98. So either I was really awesome at tangents this year, or the course was long previously.

Since I didn’t want to expose my skin too much to the cold I chose not to look at my watch while running and instead used my music to cue my walk breaks. I used the same method that I had used on an earlier training run when I had forgotten to charge my watch and ran for two songs and walked for one song. Which worked out pretty well, other than the Green Day double-header that came during mile two and made a 7 minute long (or longer) walk break.

Surprisingly, I felt pretty good for the majority of that race! I figured I would really start feeling things after mile 3, if not a little earlier since I had only managed two 2 mile training runs, but I actually didn’t really feel any suckiness until very close to the end. By that point I was just done being out in the cold and wanted to be finished so I could get in my car and blast the heater.

Here are my official race results:

• Time- 1:25:43
• Avg Pace- 17:08/mile
• Age Group- 68/71
• Overall-413/427
• Gender- 217/231

And for a little fun, here are the comparisons of 2017 vs 2018!

Yes, this is a picture of my computer screen at work. Sue me.

I don’t know what is up with my watch, since it is the same watch for both race but it did not record any heart rate data, and looking over my last couple of activities, I don’t think it recorded any HR data for those either. But it’s fun to compare and see what the differences are. I am pleased that the difference isn’t too great considering I did not workout hardly at all last year.

I will end this recap with a picture of the “lake”/fountains at Art Hill! It was so pretty (but so cold out). The splashes have started to build up and freeze around the fountains. My sweat/condensation was freezing on my eyelashes, eyebrows, hat, and neck buff. It was crazy, but I am proud that I got out and ran despite not wanting to really do that in the weather.