I ran the Leesburg Rotary 10K on New Year's Day. My wife and her mother ran the associated 4K. The races wind through Ida Lee and Morven parks in Leesburg, Virginia, a historic town 40 miles west of DC. The races have the feel of high school cross-country meets -- you start down (and finish up) a hill, which is a large unkempt lawn, and run on a mix of dirt road, paved road and jeep trails. It's a hilly course, not a PR race (as if any January 1 race would be). I did beat my 2007 time by nearly five minutes, which I'll take, and I flirted with (though I did not achieve) a top-10 finish.
In the gymnasium after the race they served bagels, cookies, bananas and coffee, as any good race should. The room was full of kids who came for the 4K, a few of whom must have run the 10K as well. Watching those kids I remembered that this was our summer family event when I was young. I ran with Dad starting at about age 6; within a few years my older sister and younger brother both had joined us. We ran many of the local 10Ks in Anchorage in the very early 1980s, Mom getting us started and cheering at the end and Dad out running, helping to keep us moving forward. Many of those races started and finished on the park strip in Anchorage, a large lawn between 9th and 10th running west to east across downtown.
Nostalgia aside, let's hope a January 1 race gets the year off on the correct foot. The big goal for the first half of the year is a marathon PR, and I have 3 months and 16 days to get ready.
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