Mesa Turkey Trot 10k

I woke up bright and early Thanksgiving morning to run my first 10k!

Despite the fact that I ran 9 miles last week, I was still nervous to run this 6.2 – it’s the first time I have done a race at this distance and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

Once I arrived at the park, I checked in to get my shirt and race bib – my bib number 1999, I thought it was a cool number. Shortly after I met up with my friend Chelle.

We spent some serious time waiting in the bathroom line before the start of the race. While we were waiting I was approached by numerous people asking to take pictures of my turkey hat. Sometimes it was a little awkward since they wanted pictures of me wearing it…I have the feeling I am going to find random pictures of myself in this hat around the internet.

A few days before my race I asked my friend Lorraine if she could crochet a turkey hat for me to wear to my race. She happily said yes, since she frequently crochet’s baby hats to sell on her website (www.munchkinears.com). She is seriously amazing, I can’t believe she made it – and that quickly too!

I am really glad I got a stack of business cards from her because I was stopped a lot about my hat :)

When it got close to the time for us to start our race we headed over to the starting line with Melissa, Tami and their dad. There were about 5000 people running the Turkey Trot, so we started pretty far back in the crowd.

Once the race started it was hard to navigate through all the people, but after the first mile and a half it started to clear up a bit. The course had clocks at every mile so you could check your pace – since I don’t have a Garmin, or any other GPS device for running, I found it to be really helpful.

At various times throughout the race people would run up to me to tell me they liked my hat – it was also fun to see people laugh at it when I would run past them.

I felt pretty good through the whole race, I didn’t really get too tired at any point and my knees didn’t have any pain the whole race (thank you flat roads!!). When I reached mile 6, I was ready to finish strong. I kicked it up a notch and ran past as many people as possible to the finish line – passing the final clock at 1 hour and some odd seconds.

After meeting up with the rest of the gang and discussing our times (all of us did awesome! Everyone was under 1:15!) we headed home to enjoy some turkey. And on a completely random note, I like how they had “Turkey Trot” branded water bottles. They entertained me.

After returning home I checked my official chip time online – I finished in 58:31!! I cannot believe I finished in under 1 hour. I was running this race for fun, but ended up running a 9:25 average mile – I definitely exceeded my expectations. Now I am really excited to run the Iron Girl 10k with my favorite bloggers in a couple weeks :)

PS –  I like how Tink’s butt made it into this picture :)