Ran Newnan's Lake 15K Race This Morning

It had been a while since I'd last run as far as 9.3 miles...the last time was during last February's Five Points Half-Marathon here in Gainesville.  I had been looking at earlier races this year and in late 2017, but different circumstances prevented me from entering them, one of them being a persistent, nagging problem of me gagging after running for any substantial distance.  I finally got on the Internet and sought a solution through various Q & A sites, finding nothing useful until buried deep down a list of comments someone had written that they took a Zantac about an hour before running and was careful to also drink a lot of liquids.  I took that advice and since then have never had a problem...evidently, acid reflux had been the culprit.  When I signed up for this year's Newnan's Lake 15K, an event I had run before in 2015 and 2016, I was already confident I had surmounted this problem after running for 6.3 miles the week before without any hint of gagging.  Whew, glad that's behind me...

The Newnan's Lake 15K, a few miles east of Gainesville, starts at a boat ramp park off Hawthorne Road on the south end of the lake and skirts Hawthorne Road, then down another road on the lake's west side (good scenic view).  It then veers left down a divided highway...and then the course is reversed back to the finish line.  This was a slight change from when I had run it before...I kind of like the change as the earlier course had a confusing stretch to it.  The temperature at the 8:30 AM race time was 53 and the humidity was an annoying 90%.  I liked not having to shiver at the starting line as I had on colder mornings in bygone races, but I knew that temperatures in the 40s would have helped me more as the race progressed.  As it happened, though, the warmer and muggier conditions didn't bother me at all...

My goal for this race was simply to finish it: run as much as possible, then walk if need be.  And start out slowly...if I felt more confident toward the end, I could speed up.  And so I ran it at an easy pace for the first half.  But as we turned around to make our way back, I realized that I wasn't at all tired and began to push myself...and so continued, all the way to the finish line.  My final finish-line-crossing time of 1:38:41 was a few minutes slower than that of my 2016 race, but I still had plenty of energy at the end...a confidence builder for the upcoming Five Points Half-Marathon on February 18.  My poor feet and lower legs, though, felt very sore with all the road pounding by the end of the race.  I'm writing this a little less than three hours later, and I feel pretty good with no adverse effects...