Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Having inculcated the "atomic" habit of getting up earlier in the morning, I decided to use it today to run the Depot Parkrun 5K.  This Gainesville running event takes place every Saturday morning at 7:30 at the city's Depot Park, just south of downtown.  It's free...you only need to register at their site online and they will give you some barcodes to print out.  Take one of them to the race for them to scan along with the plastic token they hand you right when you finish, and they will scan both to record and later post your times.  I signed up early in 2019 and have now run twelve races there...my times, though, have never approached my best 5K finishes in other races from earlier years: hey, I'm getting older, for crying out loud!  You know you're getting along in years when you look at the race results and try to figure out how far you are from being the oldest finisher. Today I knew it was going to be a bit challenging since I was wearing my heavier (but more thickly padded) Air Monarch shoes while the combination of 69 degrees and 94% humidity mimicked the awful conditions last October when I struggled through the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon then.  I decided to try a faster pace than the previous Parkrun earlier this month but wasn't interested in setting any personal records...just maintain some continuity to keep in touch with public racing.  The going was rough, but as in most of my other races I ended up running negative splits, gradually picking up my pace while at the same time I was gradually feeling crappier under the conditions.  I finished with a time of 33:19, far from my best but quite satisfactory and 43 seconds faster than two weeks ago here.  On Saturday, April 8 there are two different races being held in the area: a 5K close to my neighborhood and a half-marathon starting and ending in Hawthorne.  I'll either run one, the other, or neither...no clue yet as to which one of these options I'll take.  Click HERE for today's Depot Parkrun 5K results,,.