JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge

I ran this race for the first time on Thursday.  (May 24)  The downtown HRH office has entered in this event for the last 5 years or so and this year asked the other HRH office to join in.  It was kind of hot and muggy with the evening temps in the upper 80’s.  A neat part was that each team from all of the companies were to design and wear their own t-shirt.  Ours was black cotton this year.  Looked good but not so good for running in muggy weather.

What chaos!  22,000 runners at the start.  Supposedly there were start groups for runners under 7:00 min miles, under 9:00 min miles and all others.  I ran the race with Bill, the IT Manager there and we hoped to be in the under 9:00 section.  Either they weren’t marked well or we didn’t see it but we ended up starting in the middle of the pack.

Mistake.  We had a lot of walkers and slower runners ahead of us.  The first 2 miles or so were just zigging and zagging, starting and stopping to just avoid people.  I told Bill it was a good Interval training session.  Things opened up a bit around 2.5 miles and we were able to go a little faster.  There were still a lot of people to avoid, but at least there was more space to go around them.  (Note to walkers, please move to the side of the road when walking!)

With about .5 miles to go Bill and I picked it up a bit.  Felt good to stretch things out.  I ended up crossing the finish line and Bill was a bit behind me.  I think he let up so the old guy could win.

It was still fun to be out there with a bunch of HRH people (Runners, Walkers and others just cheering us on) and to run downtown again.  Next time we’ll have to pay more attention to where it is we start.

My time?  30:38.  I guess not too bad considering.  I was hoping for under 30:00 but with all of the walking and trouble, not bad at all.

After the race there of course was beer.  Important for any good race.  Below is myself, Neil and Bill from TF’s IT.

This entry was posted on May 25, 2007 at 7:37 am and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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