Running With the Turkey

Hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving with their families.  I spent the past few days down in Florida with my wife visiting my parents, sister and nieces.  We had an absolute blast and as predicted ate like absolute animals.  I stuck to my plan of running multiple times so I did not feel too bad about the domination of food display I put on.

On Thanksgiving the wifey and I drove over to St. Petersburg to run their annual 10k Turkey Trot.  I was super impressed with the set-up and logistics of the race.  They also had a 1 miler and a 5k set up and it appeared to attract over 10,000 runners.  It was organized and they gave away tech shirts, it was the cheapest race I have entered in a long time at only $18.

I decided to run this as a fun race and pace Catherine, we had never finished a race at the same time so I promised I would stick with her.   One of my favorite things about this race was the crowd support, there was a lot of it.  Around mile 3 there were a bunch of guys sitting on their front lawn giving out beers, I stopped and downed a Miller Lite and continued on my way.  We got out to a pretty brisk pace of a 8:20 min mile over the first two miles, we pulled it back a bit for the next 2 miles before settling in for a comfortable pace.  We wound our way through neighborhood streets and finally made our way over the last mile back to the St. Petersburg high school where the finish line was in the football stadium.  I have to admit that this finish was one of the better ones, you ran through a packed stadium on the track with people all around cheering.  Overall, I was super impressed with the event and even more impressed with the wifey who ran her strongest 10k.  I was a pretty good pacer.

After dominating food on Thanksgiving I planned a training run on Saturday; we were going to meet my sister who is training for the Disney Marathon but she was getting up way too early for us.  We settled on going to the Upper Tampa Trail and hit a 8.5 mile run, one of the trailheads was a short drive from my parents place which I never knew existed.  I was super impressed with the trail, the scenery and the water stops they had organized.  It definitely will be a staple running stop when I visit my parents in the future.

The rest of the weekend we hung out, relaxed, went to the movies and spent time with the nieces who are quite the hockey players.  We went to their practice and I was super impressed with how good they are for their age, I mean, skating backwards! I still need the double edged skates to stand up!

How was your Turkey Trot? Did you get a long run in this weekend?