My racing experience dates back to the days of $5 entry fees and as an incentive for runners to sign-up organizers offered runners a free T-Shirt! Well, the shirts are mostly still here and thankfully they are a much-improved product too. In recent years some races recognize that many runners have drawers full of T-shirts and the shirts are no longer the incentive they initially were during the early years. Fast forward to current time and see some organizers offering a different incentive to runners. They offer runners to not receive the shirt and in turn pay a lower entry fee!
So come race morning I wake early and find that the last thing I really wanted to do was run a race, let alone a faster pace 5K race. It’s not unusual for me to have “race entry remorse” on race day anymore.
I am going to go way out on a limb here and assume that you, like most runners, are not a world class runner and therefore will never come close to challenging a world, Olympic, national, regional, or similar record. In the world of running, runners instead celebrate their personal records or PRs. It does not matter how fast one ran a race, what matters is how fast the runner ran for a specific distance relative to that runner’s past performances. Since most runners compete in races of various distances, most runners will accumulate their own best finish time for each distance. Thus, the title PR for that distance.
This post is why the 14th Brooksie was important to me. This year’s race was more than about returning to the event after last year’s virtual race.
Typically you will hear people say they need to start running to lose weight. Well, leave it to this architect to think differently. I knew I needed to lose weight in order to run!
A bit of background here. My friends and running buds know that I have been running in some form or another for more than 50+ years, and over the years my weight as gone up and down, so why now? Well, the short version is that I had several non-running injuries and two different surgeries during the past four years. This along with the lack of any motivation to race is how I gained unwanted pounds. Just when I was starting to recover from most recent surgery along came Covid and the end of racing.
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