Lots of strollers when there weren't supposed to be strollers in the run segment. Lots of walkers as well and people with ipods that never walked straight, so it was hard to dodge them all and keep running. At certain turns and the water stations, had to walk to get through the crowds because we were completely bottlenecked. It took about 6 minutes to actually cross the finish line because there were so many people in the chutes getting their bib numbers recorded and handing their bottom portion of the bib to the volunteers.

Find a 5K race with many fewer people. Register earlier -- my t-shirt and bib number did not come in the mail prior to the race like it should have. I had to wait in 3 lines to get a shirt that was too small and a new bib number.

Stretch, banana, water, juice, yogurt


The huge crowd.


I did this 5K with three other ladies from my boot camp (our boot camp instructor is a breast cancer survivor). One lady ran with me, and the other two walked. If you really want to race and test yourself, find something with fewer entrants. Considering there were thousands of entrants, it was too hard to navigate around all the people on the course to do any real running. This was more social in nature than competitive, but it still was a good experience and we had a lot of fun!