The Crafty Runner: Helen Gold Run

Saturday I ran the Helen Gold 10k in Overland Park, Kansas. The race is put on to raise money for Parkinson's disease research. My grandmother had Parkinson's and my aunt Betty offered to pay for the run if I wanted to run it. I am considering this my first sponsored race. I'm also accepting future sponsorships. I promise to run my best.

Female 32 to 39

Place  Name             City               Bib No  Age   Overall  Time

1      KRISTEN DAVOLT   INDEPENDENCE  MO      202   33       13   45:29.5

I placed 3rd female out of 53 and 13th overall out of 95. Above underneath place it says 1 for first in my age group not overall.I'm happy with my results of course 1st or 2nd would be better, they won prizes, but I PRed by 3 minutes so good times. The 2nd place girl beat me by a minute and a half so it wasn't one of those beat me at the very end kind of situations that make me feel like I should of beat her.The race was 2 laps around basically a huge shopping center with mild up and down hills all the way around. The 10k started at 8:00. The 10kers were sent down the street to start. The 5k started in the start/finish area and started 5 minutes after us.
They sounded the horn and we were off. I try not to pay to much attention to who is running ahead of or past me and pay more attention to how I feel and what the the pace says on my watch. I want to make sure I don't have to slow down or walk later. While I don't want to pay to much attention I do pay some attention. One girl was way ahead from the beginning, she ended up winning. Other than that there were 3 girls either ahead of me, beside me, or right behind me the first couple of miles. Right after mile 2 the girl who had been right behind me ran past and she placed 2nd. The other girls had fallen behind me, no 10k girls past or caught up with me during the rest of the race. Most races are put on to raise money for something but this race seemed to have the largest amount of walkers purely doing the race to support the cause. Could of just been that we had to loop around the walkers on the second loop while other races they are behind you the entire time. While thefirst loop there were just the 10kers the 2nd loop we ran into all the 5k walkers. While this is great that all these people wanted to come out and walk to support the cause I just hadn't experienced trying to run throughhuge groups of people causally walking before. It just made things a little interesting winding around the groups of people who weren't expecting me.