Our 5K, (or 4K, or 6K or something)

This past weekend I stayed at Jessica's house for Friday evening and most of Saturday. There were two main reasons for my visit; Jess had a project she wanted me to participate in, and I had one I wanted her to do with me.

Jessica wanted me to run a 5K with her. It was her first 5K ever! I told her all about how fun 5Ks are, and then the one we did was actually quite a bit different than the other races I've run.

The race that we did was the No Snow (indoor!) 5K at UVU. It had a pretty good turnout considering that it was the first year they've done it. I think they said there were about a hundred people.

Since UVU's buildings are all connected, they had two different routes that people could run/jog/walk—one with stairs and one without, and both went through a bunch of the different buildings.

Jess had kind of the same experience that I did when I ran my first 5K—she had been using the elliptical machine and it wasn't the same as running. So that was a lot of fun. At my first race, though, I got a medal for finishing. Which was awesome. And people waited along the finish line to cheer for everyone as they finished. I told Jess about this; it doesn't matter whether you're one of the people who officially wins—runners are suuuuper supportive of each other.

But not at the UVU race.

What happened was, we all ran, and when we finished the race, Jess and I had run 3 miles in like 15 minutes. Except that we hadn't. Apparently there had been some problem with measuring the distance of the race. So everyone was setting new personal records. And they realized that something wasn't quite right. Nobody knew how far we had actually run.

"Well, this is the end," they told us, "so you can finish now, or some people are running it again."

Jess and I decided to run the race again.

Afterwards, there was a pancake breakfast for everyone who had run. The guy who was announcing apologized for the confusion with the distance, and joked that we should tell our friends that UVU is the place to set a new personal record. He promised that next year the distance would be correct. He thanked us for helping raise a bunch of money for Habitat for Humanity.

They gave away prizes, and I didn't win anything (I never do at races), but Jess won a gift card for the outdoor store on campus. It was kind of funny that she won it because Jessica's idea of camping is staying at a motel instead of a hotel. She's not exactly outdoorsy. But it was fun for her to win.

So overall, the race was good. It was cool to be able to run a race indoors. It would have been more fun if there had been race numbers, and if the finish line was not confusing, so that people would have cheered as everyone finished.

I think there are a few different purposes to running: first, there's the race aspect. People want to know how fast they run, and they want to compete. And that part of the "race" didn't work.

But more than that, there is a sense of community. At races, everyone is out there doing something healthy. They're supporting some cause or another, and supporting each other. People are having a good time doing something that they enjoy doing. I think that part of the race was still there. Plus the shirts were pretty cool.

They gave us fliers for another race at the beginning of March, which is actually right by Jessica's house. It's a Red Cross one, and it's not the first year, so I hope that if we do that one together too, there will be numbers and goodie bags with fliers for other races, (and red shirts,) and people cheering at the end. And then Jess will see that running is so much more fun that she ever thought it would be.

(Because it is.)

And our other project for the weekend was my project. It was fantastic, just like I knew it would be. Buuut it's still a secret. I'll blog about it later this week. And post some excellent pictures.