Homeward Bound AND Race Report:* March Mustache 5K

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When I was planning my trip back to Florida to visit family and whatnot, I happened to run a quick interweb search to see if there were any short running races coming up while I would be in the area.  Imagine my delight to see that there were a few, including one on the Saturday evening of my visit, in downtown Clearwater, the town next to Dunedin, where I grew up.  This would be perfect, since it would give Mom and I plenty of time to recover from our Disney trekking, held the day before.

The March Mustache 5K was put on by a local running group in the area and was HQ’d out of the Capitol Beer House, which had a lot of amazing looking offerings on tap.  We parked just across the street from the start line, at Coachman Park/the Harborview Center, and wandered up the hill to pick up our packets and scope out the race course.  Since this was the March Mustache 5K, mustaches were expected as part of our race ensembles, so we found some on Amazon.**


See the family resemblance?

Mom and I warmed up in our own respective manners, and after a quick Huma gel, I was ready to run!


Everything is funnier when you have a fake mustache.

The route itself ran across a parking lot and then up the triple helix pedestrian access ramp to the Memorial Causeway Bridge; we headed across and down on the other side of the bridge onto the causeway, turning around and heading back the same way, then across the finish line.


Getting ready to run!



Scenes of the bridge and surrounding area.
It was really beautiful!

I always like to run well, so I did my best to push my pace and ended up finishing as the 5th female, with an average pace of around 8:22 per mile.  Mom grabbed some shots of me coming across the finish line:


Done!


The right half of my mustache came unstuck as I ran,
so this is me holding it on.

After doing a quick change in the parking lot and saying hello to one of Mom’s friends who lives in the area, we headed back to the Beer House for free pizza and beer, courtesy of Tony’s, the Italian place next door.


Hooray!

The race organizers promote the event as a fun race for everyone, so they were rather generous with the awards, giving them to the top 25 men AND top 25 women.  Since the race was capped at 200 people (or so), that meant that ¼ of the field ended up earning awards.  That didn’t make me any less proud of mine, though!


My major prize.

Overall, the run was a lot of fun.  The scenery was gorgeous, the volunteers were friendly and encouraging, and things seemed to be pretty well organized.  Additionally, for a $30 race fee, the swag was pretty darn good – we each had a free beer and slice of pizza, race medal, race t-shirt, the run itself, water at the finish, plus coupons and other random things in our race bags.  Since I placed, I ended up with the award which is pretty large and is made of real glass.  There were some slight drawbacks – the 5K was only 2.8 miles instead of 3.11, which is the standard distance.  Also, the free beer was a Michelob Ultra – when race HQ was a craft brew bar with 30 exceptional taps, a Mich Ultra is super disappointing.  Additionally, the water bottles at the finish line weren’t in a cooler and were sitting in the sun, so right after slogging across a bridge, you ended up being handed a bottle of hot water.  However, overall, the run was good, and I’d do it again, if I ended up being in town; this group seems to organize a few other races during the year in the area, and I’d recommend them to anyone looking to have a lot of fun.

Later!

Amy

* Whoever thought that the twain should meet?  Not I!

 ** Apparently, you can’t buy cheap mustaches one by one on Amazon, and since we had like 85 left over, we left our remainders with the crew at check-in to give to other race participants.  We saw several runners sporting our mustaches!

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