Mother's Day Run

There was a notice in the paper about a 5k run in a town to the north of us. There's haven't been running events up there in as long as I can recall, so it seemed like something worth going to. I figured I'd use it as my first official barefoot event. I haven't been running a lot this spring, or particularly hard, but I'm doing it all minimalist style and feel like I'm finally past all those niggling calf and foot troubles and have completed the transition to barefoot and barefoot-style running. Time to do something official totally barefoot.

Yesterday I was picking Erin up from the gym, where she had also done a bit of running on the streets around town, and I said "Oh, hey, there's a 5k I'm going to run in Nakusp tomorrow. Want to come and do it with me? We'd need to leave by about 8:30." She said yeah, sure, and would I please make sure she got up in time to eat something and get changed.

So I woke her up this morning and she ate breakfast and got her running stuff. And I mentioned that she should bring some warm stuff to cover up with, because we'd probably end up standing around for twenty minutes or so and that would make us cold.

"Standing around? Um, what are we doing?" she asked, clearly very confused.

"We're going to run that 5k Fun Run in Nakusp," I said. "We'll have to register when we get there, so we ...."

"A race?" she interrupted, laughing. "I thought there was just some 5k trail you wanted to run. You never told me it was an organized run!"

"Oh. Oops, sorry. Want to do a race?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever."

So we went. We ran. The weather was lovely. I managed barefoot. My lack of shoes slowed me down a bit on the downhills and on some of the gnarly chipseal asphalt, the kind you don't really pay any mind to unless you're barefoot. My feet were a bit sore by the end but nothing that won't be back to normal by tomorrow. All in all it was a successful barefoot run. My Garmin didn't triangulate until after the first long straight stretch, so it didn't record my time, and neither Erin nor I noticed that there was an official race timer at the finish line. Duh! We were definitely in the "fun run mindset," I guess. Extrapolating from what my Garmin did record, I think we both finished under or around 28 minutes, she about twenty seconds ahead of me, which was a pretty reasonable pace for a fun run for us.

It was a great way to start off the day.