The Almost 5k
I was always the girl who maintained that unless she was being chased, she was not running. People would talk about running 5ks or marathons and I would talk about how terrible that sounded. And then at some point this summer, I decided running a 5k sounded like a great idea. So it only makes sense that my first 5k was stormed out.
The Weather Channel app said there was about a 2000% chance for storms at race time so I wasn’t completely surprised when 10 minutes before the race was supposed to start they made us move inside because of lightning, but given The Weather Channel app’s hourly prediction accuracy history, I was 98% surprised (and 100% mad at Jim Cantore for choosing this one time in his life to be right). At 8:00 Saturday morning, instead of leisurely jogging the streets of Indy, I was packed into the plaza at Lucas Oil Stadium obsessively checking the radar as Boogs lived his best life sitting on the floor taking down Kashi bars and watching garbage videos. By 8:40 Saturday morning, my hopes and dreams were forever dashed as they announced the race would be moved indoors.
How does one move a 5k indoors you ask? Simple: one doesn’t. What followed was organized chaos as we all crowd shuffled from the front doors of Lucas Oil down to the bowels of the building so we could make our way through the tunnel and still finish on the 50. Not a single human there so much as power walked a single step, yet the volunteers at the finish line cheered for us and handed us bottles of water like we had really done something. And in a way I suppose we had really done something – we had taken a route that was nowhere close to the length of a 5k and managed to make it last longer than a 5k. A feat for which we were rewarded with medals and a chance to hang out on the field while watching our toddlers run more touchdowns than Andrew Luck last season (too soon?).
While I walked away more disappointed than the time they canceled Happy Endings, I do have to give them credit for trying to make something out of nothing. I didn’t go home having beasted my first 5k, but I did go home with enough pictures to make it sure as hell look like I did.
Soybeans, Too 