Resolution 2010: Race 3--St. Patrick's Day

For the third race of my N.Y.R. (New Year's Resolution), I decided to switch it up a little bit and headed down to Portland to visit my wonderful friend Amy so that she and I could run the Shamrock Run together.

Since it was a holiday run, and we knew that everyone else was going to be running in all of their green splendor, Amy decided that we needed to rock as much green as possible as well.  She got us amazing matching green Nike running shirts...

...and I added my own flair with the shamrock Boston Red Sox hat, the green jacket I had from coaching track, the shamrock tights from my St. Patrick's Day girls' weekend the previous year with my wonderful friend Kristine, and my striped green and white Christmas socks with the white fluffy trim that only my mother would find adorable and therefore put in my stocking for Christmas.  I'd say I had done my job on the obnoxious green outfit well!

Amy and I before the race, ready and raring to go! (Not really sure who the creeper is in the back of our picture, but I'm very weirded out right now!) And I must say that Amy did a great job rocking her green ensemble as well!

We got up to the starting line with the rest of the 6400 other runners on that crisp Sunday morning in March, and as we heard the gun go off, we started our slow procession toward the starting line (we were pretty far back in the crowd) where we were hoping to get a little more breathing room to run...not so much.  I don't know what the planners of the streets of downtown Portland were thinking, but they were clearly not designed with hugely attended races in mind.  6400 people is a lot of people to cram onto a regular old city street, so we spent the majority of the first half mile trying to find a break in the crowd so that we could increase our pace from painstakingly slow to simply moderately slow.  We finally found an opening and were able to start running at a normal pace, and even though we spent the first half mile of the race basically walking, we were still able to cross the finish line in the fairly decent time of 34:03 (which works out to an average of 10:57 per mile).

Normally this time might upset me, but the average female time was 33:59, so it seems as if everyone else had as much trouble getting out at a good pace as we did.  As far as my other stats go, I finished 472nd out of the 884 people in my age group (females 25 to 29), 2005th out of 3951 females, and 3813th overall out of the 6400 runners in attendance...so for the most part, in every single category I was right in the middle, which isn't all that bad.  And to top it off, I got a great finisher's shirt out of the deal...

...the very first Dry-Fit Technical Shirt of the N.Y.R.!  I could not have been more excited about that, or about the fact that I got to run the race with a very dear friend...running with someone always makes the race more fun, especially when you dress for the occasion!

Do you prefer running races solo or with a running buddy?