Saturday May 24th, at a bright and early 5 am was the Mackinaw bridge 5 mile race.
Bright and early and 38 degrees out made for a quick race – because I just wanted to get back into a warm bed
and sleep! See some photos of me trying to get to the end and back to bed!
Some stats for the race:
- a) Start time: 5:38 am
- b) Start temperature 38 degrees Farenheit
- c) a 5 mile run
- d) finished 248 out of 345 male entrants (72% finished ahead of me)
- e) finished 31 out of 40 in my age group (77.5% finished ahead of me)
- f) finished 370 out of 611 total finishers. (finished in the top 60% overall)
- g) had a 9:38 pace (48:12 total time)
- h) had a great time, and chalked up another new PR for a 5 mile! Hey, five races, five new personal records, what’s so hard about this? ?????? ??????
Some general observations. Based on the numbers above you can tell this is a
community of older people… and apparently fairly fit. The participation in the
older age groups is very high compared to Ann Arbor races. Realizing I am
certainly not the faster runner, I still fared much worse, especially in my age
group, than in prior races! With almost 78% of the men in my division finishing
ahead of me, this may be the lowest finishing place yet! Compare this to the overall
finish where I finished in the top 60% and you can see the difference.
The race was fun, a great workout for the legs and lungs! That long grade to
the crest really made the thighs work.
This was followed by three days of sight seeing in the area where we had a
great time.
Note that within hours of finishing this 5 mile race we were on Mackinaw
Island where we rented bikes and rode around the island, and into the interior
to see some others sites, such as Sugar Loaf mountain hill rock pile, we did not get to see on the carriage ride. So we
figured we rode at least 14 miles, then we also walked for hours around town, up to and through fort, and to various ice cream shops, etc.
Now into “training” for the second part of the “Serious Series” 10K (6.2 mile)
trail run June 14th.!
Until the Mackinaw Bridge comes falling down,