Saturday, May 17, 2014

Rollie Fingers (5K) Fun Run

Rollie Fingers (5K) Fun Run - May 17, 2014
time = 27:25
pace = 9:01 average

i'm going to start this one out by saying that i NEVER run fun runs.  NEVER.  i feel that they are a waste of time and especially money.  this was no exception.  you're probably wondering why the hell i signed up, paid, and subsequently ran the race then... yeah, i was asking myself the same damn question.

i'll tell ya... it was a simple case of me not paying attention to very important details.  let me explain.  i was perusing the internets for races to run since my leg was feeling so good for awhile there and everyone was talking about this race on the book of face.  talking about mustaches and cracker jack and rollie fingers... i mean... i'm an 80's kid so... well, you know.

with a face like that who could resist?  if you know anything about milwaukeeans you know that we love our icons.  i grew up with this guy... i grew up with the brewers.  my mother LOVED the brewers.  she made me sit through countless baseball games (in person and on tv).  more than i care to remember.  so whether i like it or not i suppose that baseball is in my blood.



i guess i got caught up in the hype for this race and well... CRACKER JACK!


so i sign up for the race and then i notice the following:
what?  so i send an e-mail asking if there will be age group awards.  i got a response telling me about the above awards.  so... um, no age group awards.  then i notice this:

are you serious?  there's no timing chips?  what kind of race has no timing chips?  how can it even be called a "race"?  such bullshit.  since i'm the dummy who didn't read pretty much ANYTHING before i went all crazy pants and signed up... i have no one to blame but myself so what did i do?  i enlisted kellie to do the "race" with me.  she opted to volunteer at packet pick up in order to get a free race entry... again something i failed to read when i was blinded by my overzealous itchy race fingers.  in retrospect i am not very good at looking before i am leaping.  sometimes this proves to be a hinderance... in this case, it turned out ok.  i had a good time.

since kellie was volunteering i opted to volunteer alongside her being that i'm currently unemployed and had nothing better to do with my friday afternoon.  so we hung out at running performance outfitters in brookfield, wi handing out race packets.  it was a decent time overall.  i got a mustache t-shirt out of the deal so that's cool.  i also got an excellent idea that i can't tell you about yet so stay tuned for that in the next few months.  i promise it is going to be amazing if kellie and i can pull it off!

race morning was well put together so that was nice.  being on the stadium grounds was great in that there are ample bathrooms and they had a ton of porta pottys to go around as well.  
oh so sassy before the race

there were several thousand people signed up for the race so they sent people off in waves.  i liked that because it spread us out so there wasn't much clumping.  i'm really disappointed that they didn't offer chip timing.  i mean... REALLY disappointed.
corralled


i also opted to pace kellie to a PR which is great because she ran really well and did such a great job.  the course was awesome and ended at the start, but the finish shoot sort of wasn't at all awesome.  it wasn't well organized with the water and the refreshments.  i mean... it was ok but it wasn't the best.  the volunteers were not organized and weren't handing out the items and there weren't any BANANAS?  how can there not be any bananas?  aren't bananas a staple of ANY race?!?  for the amount of money this race cost they really could have timed it and they could have had freaking bananas.  those are my biggest complaints.  also... my garmin put the race at 3.04 not a 3.01 so it wasn't accurate either.  based on my experience i won't run this race again and i probably won't run a race that i see cerulean sports group is putting on.  while it was ok... it was only that... ok.  i would much rather spend my money on something that i walk away from feeling great about.   lastly, the company website is out of date and clearly not kept up which i also find off putting.  if you're going to have a company website you should probably have up to day information on it.  the events they have listed are from 2013.  while that's not too out of date it certainly doesn't reflect what is going on right now.  i hope that they send out a survey regarding this race because i would like to give them some feedback on how it went.

in totally other news i've been doing the exercises my PT gave me and that i thought were totally bollox.  a couple of days ago i ran 8 miles.  not fast but i ran them and wasn't out of commission for days afterwards.  i plan to run another 8 tomorrow and i see my PT again on monday.  maybe what i'm doing is helping?  only time will tell but i'm going to be cautiously optimistic.

4 comments:

Josh said...

Ha! I wondered why you registered for this when you first mentioned it on your blog. I must admit, though: I was actually interested in doing this race a while ago when I first saw the ads. Fortunately I noticed it was "self-timed" and didn't fork out the money to do it. Also, I'm curious about this mystery idea!

nikki said...

i think you're going to love my mystery idea... i've considered you in it. ;) stay tuned...

pandemic_pounds said...

i'm FAMOUS!

Sun said...

Yay, sounds like you are making progress - running 8 miles at a time is great!

Sorry to hear the race wasn't that great. I agree that a race of that size and at that cost should have sprung for chip timing. Maybe next year they'll make some improvements!