If you've run many races, chances are you probably have a pre-race routine you tend to follow pretty closely. I've been doing it since high school, which was (cough) years ago, and I still tend to fall back on the familiar stretches and warm-up run. I don't know if it's superstition, or laziness, it's just what I end up doing without giving it much thought.
At least it's what I used to do. Over the last few years, I have to admit, I've gotten more lax with my pre-race warm-up. These days, I generally don't get to races too early, and I tend to do a few stretches, and barely any running. I shake out the legs a little, hit the starting line, and take off. Most of the time, I use the first part of the race to warm up.
For Saturday's Cinco de Miler event however, I was thinking ahead to some longer races I'm running in the next couple weeks. So I needed to put in more miles than just the five that covered the race. And since the 9:30 am start time was a little on the late side, my training partner and I decided to go out for between 4-5 miles before the race. I figured that would be a good way to get some extra distance, but it would probably affect me toward the end of the race.
I was wrong. After running the race much better than I expected, I believe those miles did affect me. In a good way. I ran the Shamrock shuffle, which was virtually the same distance, a few weeks ago in just under 35 minutes. So I hoped to do the same at the Cinco race.
Instead, since I was pretty loose from the long warm-up, I went out at 6:45 pace, and kept it there for the whole race. I ended up running 33:30, and had plenty left for a good finish. My friend, Rick ran it hard, and won his age group with a an impressive time of 30:33. It was almost a minute faster than Shamrock for him also. My warm-up partner, Tom, ran at least a minute faster than he was expecting as well.
We usually decline the beer they offer after some races, but this one called for a celebratory toast at the post-race party.
And it was quite a party. They served Chips, salsa, and tamales to go along with the Mexican beer. This was the first year RAM put on this race, and I'm sure it will become an annual draw on the racing calendar.
It's a great concept. A five mile race, centered around Cinco de Mayo, complete with Mexican food, and mariachi music was a great way to celebrate. Add in the fact it was along the beautiful south portion of the Lakefront path, and ended on the lawn outside Soldier Field, and you have a really nice morning.
It was a little bit of work getting there. We had to park at Soldier Field ($17), and then take shuttle buses to the start at about 39th street. But that seemed to be well-organized, and it went pretty smoothly.
There were lots of great races in the area to choose from this first weekend in May, but I was pretty impressed by the Cinco de Miler. If you are interested in results, you can find them here: http://www.cincodemiler.com/results/.
Meantime, I'm going to pay a little more attention to my warm-up from now on. See you on the roads.......
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