5Km with the Pancake People

First of all, yesterday. I headed down to Jells Park to watch the AV X-C, women's 8km and men's 12Km. It was a lovely day and I really enjoyed the atmosphere, I'd forgotten how much I missed the team camaraderie since leaving baseball. How many sports can you participate in alongside elite athletes, I mean, I got to see Mona run!!!! It pretty much sold me on club running, so I'll be signing up next year. Today's schedule was for a 5Km race at Princess Park with the Sri Chinmoy race team, as usual a fantastic well run event from the Pancake People. I discovered that my footpod had a flat battery, well, I had been meaning to start getting a feel for pacing myself without it so now was a good a time as any :-) Off I went with the gun, with pretty even splits of 4:33, 4:33, 4:40, then missed the 4Km mark so the last 2Kms were 9:08. I am pretty sure the last 1km was a quick one, I flew to the finish line. All up I think it was 22:36, but will wait for official results. It was a PB by over 1 minute (last one taken from last half of the willi 10km, 23:41). Imagine my surprise when I finished and was told I was the second female in :!: . Not getting too excited as I am sure it was a very small field, hey if there were only 3 chicks then I came 2nd last. Still, happy to get my first medal that is not an "everyone gets a prize" medal. Even happier to have a new PB and to have run such even splits. Then I waited for Beki to come through and ran her last 5Km with her. She was struggling with a bung leg and I wasn't there to push her, just to make sure she did not DNF because I knew she would be angry with herself later if she did. I was very impressed with her kick at the end, despite how she was feeling. We then proceeded to eat pancakes and cheer all the others through as they were all doing the longer events. Special mention to the always unstoppable Michelle putting on 31.1 km today, I really wanted to join her for her last lap but I was pushing my luck with time and had to get home and get on with things. So I finally feel like I have my legs back and will look forward to some proper Kms in the coming week and solid long run next Sunday.