The Beer Run

I am a morning person. And I love to get my workout in before my day gets started. It energizes me for the whole day. As much as I am a morning person, I am not much of an evening person. What made me decide that it was a good idea to do an evening 5k run event, I’m not really sure. But the worst time for me to do a 5k race is at the end of the day, particularly at the end of the week.

But this was the Inaugural Tap House 5k where the post-race amenities included beer and more beer. I’m not even a beer drinker, but when they threw in the fact that the top 30 men and women would be awarded with “Das Boot” – well, now maybe I had something to race for.

That evening, while dressing for the race, Tim was focusing on his goal… “19:30… 19:30” he said, over and over before adding… “and then for the 2^nd mile”. And for this race, he wore his most appropriate “Will Run for Beer” tech shirt.

We left home early to miss the traffic on the way to Oldsmar and found a nice and shady parking spot only steps away from the start line. We picked up our race packages then walked around to loosen up. We wondered over to the tent where they were displaying the awards. Now Fred Ryzmek, the race director, was setting out to put on a really great event, but I must say that “Das Boot” wasn’t nearly as cool as I was hoping. I was expecting a glass beer boot – maybe even with a race logo on it. But these were plastic beer boots from Hofbrau Haus, hung from a lanyard to wear around your neck.

Any devoted beer lover might actually drool at the thought of winning one of these boots – but being the “winer” that I am, I realized (with some relief) that I didn’t actually have to “race” tonight! But now I had to decide… did I want to run hard or pace Dawn or run/walk with Sally. I’d figure it out at the last minute.

We lined up at the start line and Fred Ryzmek announced that they had been hoping for a turnout of about 250 and wound up with 1200!! Wow!!

The gun went off and away we went, and even while running, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with this race. Less than ½ mile into the run, I looked back and Tim was right on my heels. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? Who better to run with at the beer run than the beer meister himself!

I kept the pace going and Tim stayed with me as we hit the Mile 1 mark: 7:55 (that’s fast for Tim). After about 1.5 miles, Tim hinted at slowing the pace just a bit and we hit Mile 2 at 16:07 (8:21 for the 2^nd mile). After that, he had to back off more to catch his breath and we paced a 9:21 3^rd mile and finished in 26:13 – which is terrific for Tim.

We’ll start working on how to negative split and I feel confident that we can easily get his 5k time down to about 24 minutes.