Honor Connor 5K (#10)

Back at it!! This one was tough but so fun.  The Honor Connor 5K was in honor of a 15-year freshman who died tragically in a drowning accident.  The event to honor this kid was fantastic and overwhelmingly positive for the family of Connor.  The expected group of 500+ runners turned out to be over 1300, I think.  It was very easy to see the impact this kid had on his friends and his community and in a day and age where kids are just completely lost about life and relationships it was encouraging to see the family support regarding Connor.  I'm so happy my friend, Melissa, told me about this 5K - it was an honor to do it.

The race itself had a good course but I guess now I can see that my age is going to make the remaining races a bit of a challenge.  About a mile and a half into this race I started feeling pain on the outside of my knee down through the outside of lower leg and it progressively got worse.  So the run was plagued with pain and walking but I still finished.  Not my best run but still respectable in my mind:

Race Chip Time - 30:43
Pace - 9:53/M
Finished 208 out of 424 timed runners
Finished 15th out of 22 in my 40-44 age group

After the race was fun as long as you consider excruxiating pain as fun.  I could barely bend my left knee and couldn't really put any pressure on it once I got home so here's the fun part.  As soon as I crossed the finish line I asked my friend about the pain and she mentioned the IT Band as a possible cause of the pain. As you can see from the image below the ililotibial band is pretty important in running - heck, it's important in walking but all wasn't lost as several runners who have battled the injury advised me to stretch - so that's what I did and it was almost an immediate aid to the pain.  So, "Thank You, Melissa!"

I was planning on running the "Viva La Run" tomorrow but I think I'll just wait until this weekend to continue with the 40 5K Quest.  We'll see how I feel and go from there but I'll be in Irving this weekend participating in the 1st Annual Diaper Dash benefitting CLASP international.  Here is the website and race information - http://claspinternational.org/

Rest assured, I'll be stretching and streching some more in preparation for this week/weekends run...wish me luck!!!