Mercer Freedom 5K Race Recap, May 27, 2019
The Mercer Freedom 5K took place in Mercer, PA, which is near where I grew up. I did this race because it was at an approximate time that DopeyBadger said I should put a race, and I thought it would be nice to do one near my hometown.
This was an extremely low-key, low-tech race. I thought that since a timing company had race results from last year (and was scheduled to do it this year, too), it would be chip-timed, but that was not the case - read on. There were 166 runners this year, about the same number as last year. Pre-registration was $20 by mailing in a paper form to Pizza Joe's, the sponsor - veterans ran for free. You do get a reasonably nice T-shirt, no medal. No map of the race course online, just a description of the route. Shrug.
Race day turned out to be gorgeous and sunny, with a T+D of about 110. Start time was 8:30am. My mom went with me to the race. It was almost an hour drive to Mercer. I had a normal full breakfast, and we got to Mercer at about 7:15am. We walked around to find the start... on the street next to the Post Office. Check. They sort of had a map of the course. Walked around a bit, used the bathroom at the convenience store, and my mom sat in the car and read a book while I did some easy running for a warm up.
I found someone who looked like he had run the race before - yep, a veteran of both the race and the military - and he filled me in. The race was all downhill on the way out and all uphill on the way back, with some rollers, but we go a bit father out than we come back. The finish line isn't all the way back, which I had known. So that was helpful - I planned to go faster on the way out to bank up a bit for the uphill on the way back.
I had been concerned about my bib, since there was no chip on it...when you get to the finish line, someone pulls the tag off the bottom of your bib and then your time is marked. They have volunteers at the end pulling the tags off and marking down the bib numbers and times. Perhaps I'm being obtuse here, but exactly why do you need a "timing company" for this? Well, I wasn't doing this race for any kind of proof of time, so no big deal about the precision.
Go get my mom out of the car at about 8:10am to head to the start line. With the small crowd, she would at least have a good view at the start and end. I had told her to note the start time and walk to the finish line to look for me 27 minutes later, plus or minus about 30 seconds, since DopeyBadger predicted 27:07 for me.
So, when I picked up my bib, I asked where the start line was, because there was absolutely no indication of it. I was told "at the pole". Sure enough, we all lined up on the street between two telephone poles. Here's a pic from my mom of us all lined up. I am in front, to the right of the person in white who is just to the right of the flag.
The race director (?) came up with a bullhorn and said, "The race course is the same as it was last year...[quick summary]...you will start on the siren." There was one wheelchair competitor, and he was sent off about a minute early.
I'm not sure they ever actually closed the street that we started the race on. A couple of cars came through in the five-ish minutes before we started, and we just kind of moved aside for them. We were only on this main street through town for about 1/2-mile, and then we were on an unpainted paved side road that was in fact closed, so maybe they didn't bother since everyone was through that first section pretty quickly.
At any rate, they set off a hoot from a police siren to start us, and everyone took off like a shot. The first 1.75 miles are generally downhill, but the first 0.5 miles are
really downhill. Folks were sprinting like they were going to dive forward. I was thinking we were going crazy fast, and saw, yep, like a 7:00 pace. I pulled back pretty quickly and fell way back, but figured I'd be passing most of them later on. I did want to take advantage of the downhill to bank some time for the second half of the course.
In that first half-mile, we ran by the very nice small-town square with their war memorial, where they were having some Memorial Day ceremonies later on. They also had an absolutely enormous US flag suspended over the street from two fire truck ladders (for the parade later that day) that we ran under, which was really cool.
After approximately a half-mile, we got to a Y-intersection, and we took the right leg onto a less-major road into some farming country. The road was still paved, but smaller. The downhill was much less steep and got into some rolling small uphills, but mostly downhill. The Y-intersection was the finish line that we would come back to.
My first mile came in at 8:14, which is probably one of my fastest race miles, since this is only my third 5K race and all of my other races have been longer. I was happy with that, since I knew the return was going to be hard. The course continued with some rolling hills but mostly down until about 1.75 miles, which was the turn-around. From my Garmin, I can tell that from the start to 1.75 miles, it was about 200 ft of elevation loss, with some rolling gain in there.
Then the return 1.35 miles was mostly uphill, with some rollers. Mile 2 came in at 8:53. Mile 3 was 9:56. That last mile was hard, because the steepest part was toward the end. I started fartleking it, running a little easier toward a landmark, then harder toward a landmark, then easier and so on. The elevation gain on the return was about 100 ft. Garmin says the total elevation gain was 150 ft, so the rollers added the extra.
I got up to the chute, and my mom was ready for a great photo:
And then I had to have someone tear the darn tag off my bib! Fortunately they really were ready to do this. Done. I forgot to hit my Garmin right away...I got 27:40 on my Garmin.
My mom and I had a long uphill walk back to the town center and Pizza Joe's for the results. Based on the previous year's results and my time, I had a chance of placing in my age group, so I wanted to stick around and see. I got a bottle of water and we walked back.
A lot of the runners gathered around Pizza Joe's and we waited for quite awhile. Someone finally came out and said that there was some of glitch in the timing, and so that's why there was a delay. Shortly after that, they posted the list of results in the window of the pizza shop - it just had all the runners in place order, along with age group placement, but no finish times. I got 4th in my age group (no award), so we left. (They had people dressed in Civil War period costumes to give out the awards.)
Later that evening, the timing company posted the results online along with the finish times. I finished in 27:08 (Note: DopeyBadger's training plan predicted 27:07). I was 4 out of 16 in the 41-50 age group - I was 3 seconds behind the 3rd place woman, and somehow I don't even remember seeing her. I was 84th out of 166 runners total, and 24th out of 74 women.
This was a fun race that fit my training plan goals for the moment. It was definitely a different perspective to do such a small-town race.
