Started out inauspiciously. There were only about 60 people or so, and it was not very organized. They had one of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders leading everyone in stretching and then out of the blue the organizer said "runners ready, set" and everyone was scrambling to the line. At "GO" I take off from the front and was out ahead of everyone. I knew there were a group of fasties and they passed me at about the 1/4 mile mark. I try to stick with them and we are cruising along pretty well and I'm in 6th place.

After awhile we are following the green arrows on the course and moving out. We pass a "2 miles to go!" sign and I hit my watch ..... uhhh, 5:04??? Yeah, right!! That's accurate. And that happened to be the last marker on the course ...... period .......

We are moving along, I get passed by three people so I'm in 9th now with a decent gap behind me to the next person. I have no idea of my pacing and am getting tired which means I went out way fast. I try to just stick with the guy in front of me who also has a blue shirt. The fasties are pulling away in front of us.

We keep on rolling and get to the hill after the bridge and the blue guy is the only one I see. We should be in the 1-1/2 - 2 mile area, but I have no idea for sure, only going by my time. The blue guy is about 100 meters in front of me. Cruising along, I finally catch the blue guy and there is no one in front or behind us.

We get to a fork and there is no marker and no volunteer. I know they run 5k's here a lot and they sometimes go right, so we look at each other and say, "Let's go right" ....... we come up on some walkers and I ask them if they had any racers go by and they said no. Oh well ...... we're off course ......

I know the path takes us back to the start area, so we stay on it. After about a 1/2 mile I say "f--k it" and we stop to walk to the finish since we were off course. At that point one of the guys that was in front of us comes the opposite direction and says the finish is right up there even though you're going the wrong way. So we pick it up and run easy into the finish.

Amazingly enough, we only lost time and not places by going longer. We finished 8th and 9th. Oh well, no shot at breaking 19 today!! Find a more organized race and then go for it again.

Not go out so hard, figure out my pacing even without mile markers. Run in an organized race .......

Sat down and had a bagel and talked with others. A lot of people took "alternate routes" for the course.


Lack of course marking, going out really hard.


This was their first 5k ever and it showed. They tried, and were really nice people, it just wasn;t run well on the racing side. Pre and post race activities were good, just the race itself was bad. Just ended up making it a nice hard workout today, not really a race.