Race 10-108 Turkey Trail Trot

November 25, 2010
5mi. - 9th/824 - 30:03
Garmin tracking here.

Wow. It's been a year since I last updated this blog. Things have gotten away from me a little since I've been more focused on updating detailed past records of my race log.

So I ran the Turkey Trail (neé Beach) Trot for the 5th year in a row. The weather overnight was near record lows and early morning reports said the temperature in San Francisco was 44 degrees so I opted for a long sleeve tech shirt. It was a bright sunny days and I arrived 15 minutes before race time.

It was the 4th different course I've run on this race (beach, 5k, double loop, and this one) but I knew it better than I knew any of the others because I spent yesterday afternoon measuring and marking the course. I didn't see any blazing fast people at the starting line, in fact the fastest 2 people I saw were Magdelena Boulet and a several months' pregnant Clara Peterson. For some reason I didn't pay much attention to what place I was in, but I know it was somewhere around 10th. I started near the MacNiders (Ian and Andrew) and commented to Ian that we better not finish behind a pregnant person (we didn't, fortunately because I know several Excelsior Club guys who wouldn't let me forget something like that). Ian and Andrew slowly pulled away and/or I fell off pace around a half mile in but more or less maintained my place after that.

My first mile was under 6 minutes and the second, mostly downhill, was around 6 minutes. After completing the first loop we headed off to a part of the course I had never raced - some trails between Middle Drive and MLK. I traded places with a couple guys and passed a guy who had to stop and walk twice. I finally caught a guy I had been working on catching at mile 4 and tried to catch one more but didn't quite have enough left.

I ended up in 9th or 10th place (I think). I was 3rd in the 30-39 age group which got me a bottle of 2009 Charles Shaw wine, which I'll have to save for a very special occasion. I've been trying to diversify my race schedule over the last couple years but I like the course for this one, it's close to home, and the race atmosphere is great so I'll likely come back to this one every year in the foreseeable future.