With the onset of fall, it’s time for autumnal races to begin, and that means the Go! Halloween 5K gets a turn on my calendar.

After Saturday’s Midwest Jeepthing event at Moonlight Racing, I was pretty dang sore, and wasn’t entirely convinced I’d get up on Sunday for this race.  The race began at 7am, so I had to get up at 4:30am to drive to the Metrolink station in Brentwood, where I’d catch a train into downtown.  That was seriously early, and when I went to bed last night, I wasn’t sure I’d have it in me.

When the alarm went off, I rolled out of bed, threw on Flat Colin, and motored toward the train… after a stop at Dunkin Donuts for some coffee and Munchkins!

I got to the race site, early of course, and wandered around.  Kaldi’s was there with free coffee, and three food trucks were setting up in the shadow of a double decker mobile bierhaus.  It was a glorious fall pre-dawn, and I was waking up and ready to run.

And then we waited.  And waited.

I don’t know what happened, but we kicked off twenty minutes late, and when we did finally begin, we started the race with a hard right turn.  For some reason, the race folks had to change the course unexpectedly right at race time, which meant they had to move the start line timing mats to the new start line.   The horn sounded, and 1500 of us turned on a dime  and were off to the races.

Surprisingly, I found a fair amount of mojo, and ran a pretty good race.  The course was flatter than last year, and was really pretty enjoyable, and without hills to fight, I made good time.  And, I got a bonus medal for completing the Triple 5K Challenge.  (The Go! in April and All-American in June were the other two legs.)  I love working on multi-race challenges like this, and I was thrilled to get the extra medal for my labors.

This was also the first race I’d run in three weeks.  I suspect the time off helped my body do some recovery I didn’t know I needed.  No matter why, it was a great race, I had a ball, and I’ve got more hardware for the wall!  🙂

Race Course