This is now my 2nd consecutive 5k after vowing never to run another 5k in my life (though last year I clearly just blocked the entire thing out of my memory and didn’t even blog about it).

Last year I got suckered in by the insistence that “the WHOLE FAMILY is going to run”, and it was the same this year as well.

As always, the highlight was the face painting. We have had a lot of cool face painting over the years, but the dueling, “Eastern versus Western dragon” face tattoos were pretty awesome.

Alex asked for a “cake” on his face:

“Dada, take a picture of me eating mine bacon!”

My time had actually gone up a few seconds between year one and year two (36:38 vs 36:56), but I was pleasantly surprised to be under 35 minutes this year at 34:43. A year older and a whole two minutes shaved off my time!

I ran with Sara this year for the first time, and I was definitely struggling to keep up…until I found a little bit left in the tank at the last minute to beat her by 2 seconds. 😉 “I knew you were going to do that the whole time,” she said (and she was right! How well she knows me; I was definitely going to do that the whole time.)

Oliver absolutely hates our practice runs and spends the whole time complaining about how hard it is. Often I have to hang back with him and try to motivate him to keep going.

Which is why it’s totally surprising that, come race day, there’s no catching him!

Last year he started off like a flash, but I hung back thinking, “Okay, he’s going to get tired and when he does, I’ll be back here waiting for him.” Eventually he got far enough ahead that I actually couldn’t catch up! Sara and Evelyn had started at the front of the pack, and we started at the back, so I struggled to keep up with him long enough for him to catch up to them, and then gave up and ran the rest of the race alone (well, technically I had Alex!)

It turns out that Oliver actually turned in a time of 32:57 and won his age group last year! Unfortunately we didn’t even consider that possibility and left before they called his name for the awards.

This year, he beat his time by almost FOUR MINUTES!! 29:13. That is…unbelievable. We thought for sure he must have won his age group, so it was no surprise when they called, “Oliver…” but it turns out there was a FASTER Oliver in his age group! Oliver beat the next closest person by about four minutes, but this other Oliver beat him by almost FIVE minutes! That’s nine minutes ahead of 3rd place! Yowza!

Too bad for Ollie, because he would have been so excited to win, but I still can’t believe he just went out and threw down a sub-30 minute 5k. After all the complaining he did, that little stinker!

Afterwards we went out for some post-race breakfast, and the kids got chocolate pancakes and hot chocolate. All in all, it was another great day at the race!