Cavedog Running

Ahh, Summertime. Waking up before 5AM, heat, humidity, must be Watermelon Series time!! This morning was the 1st 5K of the 15th annual Lakeland Watermelon Series put on by the Lakeland Runners Club. The race is run around Lake Hollingsworth next to Florida Southern College. Temperature at start was 77 degrees with 96% humidity. I had more sweat going during my warmup than any run in the winter. They had a great turnout with over 500 people showing up. This year, they are actually giving out finisher medals to those who register for all four races by next race and complete all four.

I had a good run this morning that went as I had planned and finished knowing I could have gone faster if I wanted to. My finish time was 19:25 which is 30 seconds faster than any of my times from last year's series. I finished 17th overall, but won't know my age group placing until later in the week as it takes them a while to tabulate everything. I did a great job of starting out slower running the first mile in 6:19. The 2nd mile was 6:15 and last mile 6:14. I didn't have much incentive to push the last mile, so I just kept running comfortably trying to concentrate on keeping good form and run smooth.

The watermelon after the race was cold and tasty!! One cool thing about the races in Lakeland is that they have someone who takes pictures of all the runners and posts them on the running club site. This is good for me since Jenny walks the course so I don't have my photographer at the finish. The only thing this race needs to do which would save them a ton of time is to have age group boxes to place finisher cards into. For some reason, they have a single male and female box to collect cards. I pity the person who has to sort all those cards. Last year it took 2-3 days for results to be posted to their site and everyone had to wait for well over an hour after the final race finished for them to get final results to hand out awards.