The corporate challenge 3.5 mile race was held last night at Chrissy Field. 41 Employees from my company participated, some of them coming all the way from Sacramento. The race was organized pretty well, they had busses assigned to pick up people from all over the downtown area and transport them to the start and then drop them off again after the race. Our bus picked us up at 5:45pm and we were supposed to arrive by 6pm. That should have been perfect and would have provided 45 minutes to warm up. Of course, nobody factored in rush hour traffic in downtown San Francisco! Well we ended up getting there at 6:30pm!!! Only 15 minutes before the race! Naturally the port-o-potty's all had line-ups, just like they normally do just before the start of the race. Anyway, I didn't have much time to warm up so I did what I could and then ran to find my spot in the starting corral. There were about 5000 people running/walking this race, so making my way up to the 7 minute pace marker was a challenge and I couldn't get too much closer than that so thats where I started. Unfortunately this race was not chip timed, so the closer to the front the better. On a side note, if I do this race next year I will run from the office to the start of the race since it is only about 2 miles! Anyway, as I was making my way closer to the front, I bumped into a co-worker who was going to run a similiar pace so we both headed to the front together. He then told me that last years front runner for our company was probably closer to the front. I was hopping to spot her and hang with her for the race, but couldn't find her and as I said, it was too crowded to try to get closer.
The race started and the first few minutes was spent jockeying for position and trying to avoid the slower runners who started to far ahead. The course was beautiful, it started at Chrissy Field, headed east then looped around heading west towards the Golden Gate bridge. Since the race started at 6:45, the sun was starting to dip over the horizon, glowing behind the bridge, what a beautiful sight!
The course is almost entirely flat which is also nice, they only negative about the course is that for the entire second mile (and a bit more), you are running on a loose crushed stone path which kind of slows you down. The race was a lot of fun, I wasn't expecting to run too fast and I didn't. I was the second finisher from my company, the first finisher also won the most senior women executive prize, good for her! I lucked out though and ended up winning a 50$ gift card which my company was offering up for the fastest finisher. Since our fastest finisher was an HR executive, she didn't take it so I was next in line - lucky me :D
No comments:
Post a Comment