This weekend my hubby and I headed down to ATL to run a little race you may or may not have heard about.
The Peachtree Road Race 10k...you can read more about it We hit up the Expo on Saturday when we got to town. We went through all the standard procedures..stand in line to pick up packets/race number etc, then walked around and scoped out the different vendors and such. We picked up some freebies, too. Those are the most fun! I love a good race expo and this one didn't disappoint except there were just too many people for my liking. We did our thing and left pretty quickly.
Usually race packet pick up also means getting the race tee. Not this race! You must FINISH the race in order to EARN the coveted Peachtree Road Race tee shirt. How cool is that!? Pretty neat unless you gain an injury or something, die of heatstroke or any other number of misfortunes in which case you would not finish OR get a tee shirt. Major bummer.
Thankfully we did finish.
I knew going in that it was going to be hot and humid. Another thing I knew was that 60k people registered. Yes, sixty thousand people!!! How crazy is that?? The biggest race I have ran so far was the half marathon in Knoxville and I think there may have been 6000 people but definitely not 60,000. So, the Peachtree was definitely crowded.
We registered for this event early in 2011 or maybe it was late 2010 (my memory sucks). There was a lottery for registration and part of me was secretly hoping we wouldn't get selected BUT I am glad we did. Hubby was to be in coral G and me in H. But since there were so many people running and I knew I could not move up hubby kindly stepped back and ran in H with me. We stayed together the whole race. It was shoulder to shoulder a LOT of this race. We managed to bob and weave around people as much as we could and we maintained a decent pace given the circumstances.
I had hoped to make 1:05 since it was my first 10k but I kept telling myself that
1. it would be hot
2. it would be humid
3. there were hills
4. LOTS of people.
1. It wasn't as hot when we started as I thought it would be (started at 8:05 in wave H). I don't know the exact temp at our start time. But for those folks that were too hot they had spray stations set up on course as well as water stops at every mile! Super nice.
2. It was humid. It did not take long once we started running for the sweat to pour and my shirt to be soaked.
3. ha Hills!? These people clearly do not or have not ran in East TN! There was one hill on the course referred to as "cardiac hill," this makes me giggle. It was not bad at all. The course itself didn't feel as challenging as I had anticipated.
4. So so so many people. Walkers didn't follow proper race etiquette and move to the right side of the road, this was annoying. It was really hard to bob and weave around the slower folks. And yes I am slow but some of these people clearly were not truthful about past race times or cheated there way into faster start corals somehow.
Overall this was a really really great event. It was the perfect way to spen the 4th of July. The city of Atlanta, Atlanta track club, the many volunteers and spectators did a fantastic job. The race and post race events were very well organized. Water stops at each mile were super nice. Spectators were handing out a plethora of goodies from tees to fans to smoothies and even beer. haha
It was my first 10k as well as my first time running the Peachtree Road Race. It is a race I would LOVE to run again.
Finish time: 1:10:09
Total distance: 6.38 miles
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