Track and Treat 5k Road Race
Sunday, October 27, 2019
OK, why exactly did this morning find me crawling out of bed at 6 AM to drive an hour to North Bennington VT to run a 5k? Well, a couple of reasons. One is that my previous race this year in VT is one I worked at rather than ran as a race -and while I covered the entire course taking down the markers and can definitely count it, I'd rather have one I actually "raced" on the books too. And since the other likely option was the Middlebury Turkey Trot in a few weeks (which is a 2.5 hour drive) - finding something a lot closer on a day I ended up having open was pretty sweet. Another is that the race I would have done, the Squirrelly Six up at Thacher Park (only half an hour away!) cost $50 for day of registration. Giving some compelling reasons I might consider paying that much for a 10k, but no such reasons existed in this case - heck, I can go up there tomorrow after work and run the course for free if I want to.
As an added bonus, the weather today was awful... cold, windy, and raining. I think there ended up being eight of us in the 5k (there was also a mile fun run which had a better turnout) and at least half of that number were people moving at paces similar to my own. 40ish minutes was just the right amount of time to be out there.
I got the impression that everyone there was affiliated with the Village School of North Bennington, a small private pre-k to 6th grade school - the race is a fundraiser for them - since they all seemed to know each other. They also had a mini festival going on in the school gym, with a bounce house and pumpkin painting as well as tons of baked treats. I suspect some folks were wondering where the heck I appeared from...
I definitely made the best decision to come back yesterday... if conditions in Framingham were like those in Bennington, the Bushwhack would have been miserable, especially for the poor volunteers waiting for me to get my slow backside through the course. And the drive back on the MA turnpike would have been truly awful.
This weekend completes my usual 9 states for 2019... with a slight possibility that I may still get to a race in OH and make it 10.
2019 Event Totals
Run 229.8 mi, 61 hr 9 minBike 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
Snowshoe 16.3 mi, 5 hr 57 min
Kayak 0 mi, 0 hr 0 min
states visited: CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT
