Bloomsday

I have been wanting to run Bloomsday for years.  It's a race my mom has done a number of times and somehow I just never made it over to Spokane to do it.  So, since I'm signed up for the Seattle Rock n Roll Half Marathon in June (uh oh I've now said it publicly, I'm going to have to pony up), May 1st seemed like the perfect time to run a 12k race.  The Staceys are also training for the half so we made a girls weekend of it and left the husbands with all the kids and drove over Saturday.

At the starting line



Spokane was chilly (42 degrees at the starting line) but during the race the sun came out and the atmosphere was so festive.  There were even guys camped out on the "doomsday hill" handing out beer to those runners who decided to quit part way up the 3/4 mile long 11% grade hill.  It was a doozie!! 

Despite the hills, the course was a lot of fun and it seemed every resident of Spokane was out cheering, there were bands playing every quarter of a mile or so -- it was a ton of fun.  Andy asked me how many people ran it and I said "oh I don't know, ten thousand?"  He totally didn't believe me.  So this morning I looked it up, and sure enough I was wrong.  There weren't ten thousand runners - there were fifty thousand!  So you can imagine the amount of energy that crowd was putting off.  It was a total blast.

I've been training since about January and though I may not be as fast as I once was, I managed to cross the finish line in 1:04:09 -- a pace of 8:35 minutes per mile.  I was really proud of myself for getting there after two pregnancies in three years and limited time to train.  No where to go but up, but this is a start and I am feeling great.

The Stacey's also totally rocked it -- Botimer crossed in 1:11 and Lewis pulled off an AMAZING 1:16 after literally training for like two weeks to get ready for it.  Something tells me that girl is going to rock Seattle's world at the half marathon!

Here were my stats (I love how they put all these stats together and have them ready the following morning):

Shannon M Block
Finish Time: 1:04:09

Overall Place: 4,089 out of 50,611
Ran with a pace of 8:35 per mile
The average pace for 29-year-olds was 13:52
Placed 127th among 926 people the same age
Placed 29th among 325 people from Walla Walla, WA
Placed 3,050th among 40,267 people from Washington
Placed 1st among 4 people with the same last name
Placed 1,042nd among 30,568 females
Placed 38th out of 613 among 29-year-old females
Placed 257th out of 4,273 people in your age group

And here we are enjoying a much deserved post-race beer.



We had an amazing weekend and all the dads did great back at home.  Although Andy definitely didn't score any points for housecleaning, I'd say daddy daycare was an overall success.  We're planning on doing this race every year and I think next year we'll take the husbands along -- hey, Grandma, want to babysit?  May 6th 2012 here we come!