This is one of my anniversary races, our goal race for my running class five years ago. Has it been that long already?

My times have always been all over the place for this race. Last year I ran it with a really bad head cold — the one that screwed up my Napa to Sonoma Half training. The year before that I was training for Napa and had combined it with a long run. Both years my times were slow. This year, I wasn’t training for anything so the race was about having fun.

On Thursday evening, my mother had a set back at the hospital and was awake with her in ICU and managed to get three hours of sleep on a very small sofa in the waiting room. At the time I didn’t think I would be running but when she rebounded nicely on Friday and made it through Friday night ok, I decided to run the race.

I’m glad I did, and I’m sure my doctor is as well. While I have been dealing with my mother’s ongoing illness I know the one thing that has been keeping me sane and healthy has been my running. There have been adjustments along the way like that whole getting up to run at 5:00 am thing that I have finally gotten used to. But that has also meant fewer miles in the morning.

But the race itself was perfect. I didn’t PR but was three minutes off my 2009 PR. I’ll take that since I wasn’t racing this and had zero goals aside form having fun. I ran pretty well and felt pretty good the whole way. When I looked at my splits after they were all pretty consistent so that was pretty good.

You also can’t argue with ice-pops after a hot race. Popsicle is a trademark name just like Xerox so you can’t use that word to cover all frozen ice treats. Just don’t do it!

I’m still feeling good about my running these days and look forward to this weekend’s Queens 10k that I completely forgot was this weekend until about an hour ago. Oops.