Lowell First Run 2012

The second year in a row I’ve run the Lowell First Run. For the second year in a row it was unseasonably warm for January first. We’d stayed drinking up the night before so I was thankful for the 11 am start. Katie and Dave were running the 5k and I had signed up for the 10k.

Katie, Dave and I checked in and picked up our bibs and t-shirts since we’d been in the first 1000 entrants to the race. Check in was smooth and uneventful. I ran back to the car to ditch the shirts and to get a short warm-up in before the 10k. On my way back from the car I found our friends Dutch and Julia making their way to the check in. I walked back with them and caught up with Katie and Dave. We made our way from the check in to the start line. There were 1473 participants between the 5k and 10k run, so we seeded ourselves about 30% of the way back from the start. I know the course fairly well, it’s the same course that the Thanks4Giving runs. The gun went off just after 11 am and we were off. My results are below:

Overall Place	Age Group Place	5k Time	10k Time	Pace
85	19/62	23:26:47	46:36:45	7:35

The first mile seemed longer then I remembered, but that could have something to do with the amount of weaving in and out of slow people that had seeded themselves in front of me. Dutch caught up with me around mile 2 and I hung with him for a short bit, but he put on the juice and dropped me. The final 4 miles were pretty uneventful, held a comfortable pace and enjoyed the morning.

I had picked up a new set of Brook Revenna’s from Runners Alley the day before and wanted to give them a nice easy break in. I was a little worried about them at first since they seemed slightly more narrow then the ASICS Gel-D’s that I’ve been running in for the past 3 months. The toe on the Brooks is flared more then the ASICS, so it gave my stride a little more kick. I’ll do a full review of the shoes in another post, after I’ve run in them a little more then 6.2 miles.

Both Katie and Dave ended up with PR’s for 5ks!! I haven’t been able to find any shots of them running, but here’s the results for them:

	Overall	Age Group Place	5k Time	Pace
Katie	400	34/85	29:51:10	9:38
Dave	281	30/46	27:48:45	8:59

This is a great way to start of the new year! I’m looking forward to the rest of the year!