I’ve been doing a fair amount of running lately.  Or at least I’ve been doing a fair number of races.  In July, I ran three races: two 5Ks and one 8K.  My results are as follows:

Anne, Amber and I all did the Firecracker 5000.  It was cool because it was early the morning of the 4th of July in downtown Seattle (technically, it started July 3rd at 11:55 PM) and Amber was super cool and ran with me instead of finishing way ahead of me.  That and it had the coolest shirt.  The downside were the hills – they totally kicked my butt.

The Seafair Triathlon was obviously my best time, but keep in mind I only did the 5K portion of it.  Amber’s company put together several relay teams and they were short a runner, so I agreed to compete.  It was a lot of fun and I was really happy with my results, though I’m not quite sure how I got the improvement.  All my training leading up to it seemed to get slower and slower, but I guess I’m just really competitive on race day.  Or I do better running in the morning.

The Seafair Torchlight was the most challenging of the three races, but the course was pretty cool – got to run up the viaduct.  I have to say I was pretty apprehensive about this one.  You are supposed to keep a pretty decent pace, but fortunately they weren’t too strict about it.  I wish I’d got more training time in and did a little better, but all things considered it wasn’t too bad.  I finished and I wasn’t so slow that they pulled me off the course.  That would’ve been embarrassing.

So as of the end of July, I have three new race shirts, including two technical t-shirts from the Seafair events.  There are probably easier ways to get t-shirts, but probably not as fulfilling.