Gate River Run 15k

Well, there are plenty of better ways to start a day than walking to a bus stop in intermittent pouring rain at 5:45 AM, especially when the bus is taking you to where you will run 9.3 miles!

I got up this morning to the sound of rain roaring on the tin roof of my trailer, moments before the alarm went off. My roommate, awake from the noise and never without a pithy comment, wondered aloud if the race would still be run. Even if there was a chance of it being run, I had to go - the first 300 finishers got a free T-shirt ... you can't turn down a F-R-E-E T-shirt! I got a raincoat and headed out.

At the bus stop, there were only around half of the people from my unit that signed up to run. Not a good sign. After confirming with the race organizers (some were at the same stop) that the race was still on, we passed the time thinking of ways to remind our friends how wimpy they were to let a little rain turn them away. I think it's somehow going to involve the T-shirt and some gloating, but there's always superimposing people's heads on pictures of turtles and sloths.

The beginning of the race was at a favorite starting point for races on Victory Base - a Z-shaped lake that has a 5k perimeter. This race actually ran on one side of the lake to begin with, then the other three at the end - 5k and 10k races aren't too hard to hold on base, but 15k required a creative route. Unfortunately for us, most of the area around this side of the lake was plain dirt, with a really fine and dessicated top layer of dust that turned into a VERY foul mud by the time we got there (think peanut butter, stickiness and all). It didn't really rain on us that much, but the damage was done to the unpaved surfaces, and we all waded through it to get race numbers and some last sips of water. When the race announcer told us some of the course would be unpaved, you could hear the collective groan - we were going to be slimed just by running on the roads, let alone through unimproved goat paths. I guess they had to get 15k somehow.

I started in the back, letting the herd pull ahead before working my way forward - there were more than 300 people here, and I just had to beat that 300th person to get my prize. It was nasty the whole way, especially as I passed people (we would splash the more watery sludge on each other), but it was only for a moment each time, and it wasn't enough to get the inside of my shoes wet. We ran around smaller lakes than the Z-shaped lake, over bridges, and even around what's known as "Signal Hill", the choice hill for antennas (we have a couple of ours up there ... it's a good thing we didn't have to run UP the hill). As we came around the end, I jogged in at 1:14:35 - about 8:00 per mile, just like I'd been running on the treadmill since I got back from LA.

I felt the excitement as one of the volunteers at the finish line handed me my voucher for a T-shirt - there were only 300 of these pieces of paper to be had, and I was going to redeem mine without any delay. I got to the table, and ...

"Sorry sir, we only have extra large size ..."

You have got to be kidding me! I smoked all those people over the course of an hour of running and all there was left was extra large?? I looked around and it didn't seem like that many people had finished, so I asked how they could have run out so soon - apparently, the T-shirts are the actual T-shirts given to finishers of the Jacksonville Gate River Run 15k, the namesake of this run and the US National 15k Championship, which is being held today in Jacksonville, FL in about 5 hours. The race organizers in Iraq, the 146th Expeditionary Signal Battalion, built this race to mirror the one they participate in back home (newpaper article here), and the race organizers in the US pitched in official race numbers and T-shirts! Wow.

I took my extra large and had to hand it to the 146th; just getting all the stars to align for this - in Iraq - was a feat, and I was glad I didn't roll over in bed when I heard the rain. After all, what's a little rain when a free T-shirt is at stake?

(I'll have pictures from the Public Affairs folks in a few days. They were all over the course, so there's bound to be one or two of me, plus my unit's group photo at the end).