On Thanksgiving day, 11/23/17, I ran the Turkey Strut 5K in Winston-Salem for the second time (previous race report here). Since this fall has been a flurry of moving—and all the life adjustments that come with moving!—my training lacked any structure. But I still wanted to give it my all, so I set out to see how well I could run on minimal miles.
I found this race report outline from The Running Foodie while looking for a suitable marathon for next year (reference my last post for background). I liked it, so I added a few sections (Gear, Gut, and Results). I’m going to start using this to keep my rambling to a minimum 🙂
Race: Turkey Strut 5K in Winston-Salem, NC. Start time 9 AM (yay for not being early!) Parking is easy, at the fairgrounds/Lawrence Joel Coliseum area.
Goal: Somewhere around 24 minutes. Sub-24 would be great, and a PR would be the best (but wasn’t likely).
Gear: Oiselle tights, The North Face black base layer & hat, Oiselle Volee tank, Mizuno Wave Rider shoes, Smartwool socks, Garmin watch, gloves. Forgot iPod and sunglasses–again!
Gut: No issues! Ate at 6 AM (1 fried egg, 1 toast with butter, 1 toast with PB) & 20 oz of Nuun electrolyte drink. And coffee!
Weather: Cold! 30-ish degrees. This was the coldest morning thus far this season (for me anyway), which made warming up that much more important.
Pre-race: Picked up my packet, then hung out solo in the van (came without the boys since we were hosting friends for Thanksgiving, so Javi stayed home to cook & clean—yes, I do realize how lucky I am!) Ran slowly 5-10 minutes, with a pick-up at the end, hit the restrooms, and waited at the start 5 minutes prior.
Race: The course is a T shape, with a few hills, but generally I like it because I know exactly where I am and where the turns are. I didn’t have much strategy, other than not go out too fast (easy—there were way too many people in the way to do that!), and try to keep an even pace. After the last hill, I caught my breath a bit, and pushed it in to the finish! I didn’t realize it at the time, but I ran a negative split, with miles 1 and 3 being 7:43 each (mile 2 was a bit faster due to the downhill)! Yay me, haha!
Results: 23:46 (not far off 2 years ago, when I had actually trained, and earned a PR!) Shocked that I was able to go sub-24 without being in tons of pain. Legs felt fine, it was my lungs holding me back. 5th in my age group of 128 women. Lost to 4th by 1 second… but needed to shave off 45 sec to get to 3rd. Overall I was 198 of 1,894 runners. I actually didn’t want to win any age group award, because I had to go home to cook! Full results here.
Recommend: For sure! It has a small town feel, but still a decent amount of people–almost 2,000. I like the course (minus the hills), medal and T-shirt are decent, and lots of yummy snacks afterward! I might try the Greensboro Gobbler next year (part of the Greensboro race series), just to be able to compare. Each is about 30 min from our house, but I usually defer to Winston since we used to live closer to there.
We then had a lovely turkey day feast with friends, and I ate & drank to my heart’s content 🙂
Do you run on Thanksgiving? If so, what’s your favorite race?
Garmin data:
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