Found this sitting in my drafts. Little bit late… 🙂
On Saturday (well, a few Saturday’s ago at this point) I ran the Cupid’s Chase 5k in Riverside Park. All in all, I really enjoyed the event. It is refreshing to be able to run a small 5k in the confines of Manhattan Island, and so I’ll gladly overlook the shortcomings, and instead focus on the good stuff.
First of all, I’ve never run a race in Riverside Park. I’ve covered the promenade, obviously, and the park segments south of 96th, but I’ve never run in the park proper above 96th, which is where the race was located. The park was absolutely beautiful, buried in probably still at least half a foot of snow and ice. It was so bad that when you could find a bench to sit down on, the snow came almost all the way up to the bench itself…
There were lots of volunteers out there, and so friendly. Although I did get the oddest question when I went to get my t-shirt. “Are you single or taken”? “Huh”, was my response. She had to repeat the question a few times before I understood. Of course, I’m taken, which means I got a white shirt. The single folks got red shirts. Many people work their race shirt on top of their running clothes, so you could see who was single and who was taken. I thought it was fun.
The course was a little challenging because it was narrow, there was lots of ice on the course, and it looped around on itself. I wasn’t expecting a PR effort anyway and so I didn’t let those things bother me. Another odd thing was that the race was chip timed, but there was no starting mat, so the final numbers were gun time rather than net time.
The best part was that the loot bag actually had some interesting stuff in it, and there was a great spread of food for after the race. I was able to bring some food home for my kids, which was an added bonus.
I had a pretty strong, consistent race. While it was not quite as fast as I wanted, I’ll take it considering the race conditions and the cold weather. My splits were nice: 8:22, 8:11, 8:00, 1:11, although I wonder about the mile marker placement as I know my last .1 was not that slow. My finishing time was a respectable 25:46, which was 1:20 short of my PR, and my 4th fastest of 38 lifetime 5ks.
All in all, I enjoyed the time. Sure it wasn’t so well put together as an NYRR event, but it was definitely more fun!
