The 2007 Ortega River Run was the very first race I ever ran, but it wasn’t until I showed up at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church this morning to run the 2009 version that I knew it was my favorite. I love running along the river and through the neighborhood, past the big brick houses and the bigger brick houses. The race is to benefit the church’s day school, and maybe Episcopalians are smarter than everyone else who puts on a race because this is the best organized race I’ve run – top to bottom. It’s a 5 mile race so it attracts both high end runners who feel that a 5k is too short, and scrubs who won’t die if they push themselves a little too hard (Why is everyone looking at me?). The course is beautiful. It loops around Ortega so the spectators are able to move around and see their runner at more than one spot, and with the exception of a damned bridge, it’s a very flat course so the runners can enjoy the scenery instead of having to think about tactics too much. What’s funny is how fast I ran race two years ago, even though I didn’t know about the bridge until I was running up it. Two years of age and experience, twenty-five pounds, and lungs half filled with mucous add up to an extra three minutes for me on this course. The experience part was a positive and a negative. It was a positive because I knew what was coming up, and the bridge wasn’t a big deal at all this year. It was a negative because I knew how I was feeling, and I held back for the first two and a half miles in anticipation of the bridge. The problem was I didn’t know how I was really feeling. I finished mile 5 eighteen seconds faster than I did any other mile. That’s a huge difference. I ran at a pace no one else ran at today, which is weird. Normally, there’s somebody that’s running just a little bit faster than is comfortable for me, and I’ll run behind them. I didn’t stick with a group of people for more than a ¼ mile, and that all happened before the bridge. Everyone was either way too fast, and I didn’t even try to keep up, or they were way too slow and jacking up my stats. After I turned onto the bridge no one passed me. I caught at least a hundred people in the last two miles of the race. The only thing I slightly regret is a mildly aggressive move I made at the very end of the race. I was sprinting through the finish line because I’m convinced that the chip timer is on the second mat at the finish line and the first mat and corresponding beep is a trick, and I had no room to push through because a group of women in front of me thought the race ended on the first mat. I tried to avoid them but I bumped one of them kind of hard. Not hard enough to knock her down, but hard enough to make me apologize. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know which; I didn’t regret the bump enough not to do it again. Ludacris summed up how I feel in a song he wrote years ago. It’s two weeks to the Gate River Run and I’m excited.
