Somewhere along the way, I’d heard of the virtual races at Virtual Run World, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t watching them for  races.  Their medals were kinda large and gaudy, and didn’t trip my trigger.  However, I learned recently that they sponsor a “real world” race, and that they were selling off excess medals from those race series.

That race is the Sage Rat River Run, which is run at a variety of distances, and one of those is 5K — right in my wheelhouse.  The other thing that was enticing about this was the rat on the medal.  Darla’s been chasing rats in tubes as part of barn hunt, and doggone-it, I wanted to have my own rat reward!  🙂

I decided to return to the Wildwood Greenway, and run on it for the first time in a couple of years.  This is a great paved trail, with paths on both the north and south sides of Highway 100 (Manchester Road), and is the site of my PR at 5K back in 2012.  Of course, on a nice day, it’s pretty crowded with walkers, runners and cyclists.  Yesterday was no exception.

I’d intended to just go 5K, but kinda got in a groove, and started exploring the trail, getting into some of the nooks and crannies I’ve never explored.  Before I knew it, I was over five miles for the second weekend in a row.  And once again, I found that I had a nice rhythm going (albeit not the fastest in the world!), which is giving me some real confidence about the upcoming half-marathon in Tulsa come November.  I get it that five miles is significantly less distance than 13.2 miles, but the early returns are looking promising!

So, with this weird course yesterday morning, I have no good way of extracting splits for either 5K or 5mi.  C’est la vie.  Sometimes, it’s about the journey, rather than the metrics!

Race Course