Race recap: Greek Fest 2019

I signed up for the Greek Fest 5k in a moment of delusion, thinking that I'd somehow use the adrenaline of the starting line to rally for a good race, and hey - maybe even PR the 5k! While nine weeks pregnant and routinely barfing all day. Sure. Makes perfect sense.

The race is a Friday night race before Memorial Day weekend, and it looked to be a slow one, as it was one of our first warm and humid races for the year. This was an unusually long and pleasant spring for us in NOLA, so when summer temperatures hit, we weren't ready! By race day, it was quite clear to me that PRing was not at all going to happen, even though I'd had a surprisingly good workout that Tuesday. But Friday was not a good day. I took a gel to the start, hoping that 100 calories of sugar gel would make up for throwing up any solid food I'd eaten all day. Right.

(Insert race photo here, except the NOTC's facebook page got hacked and now it's a disorganized mess missing tons of information. But for a few hours, you could get addiction treatment for cheap, in Arabic!)

I warmed up for about two miles, and started the race actually not feeling too bad. But I quickly learned not to rely on pre-pregnancy pace assumptions. I ran the first mile in 6:06, only to rapidly fall apart. I just felt weak and slow all of a sudden. The race is an out-and-back and I saw I was in fourth place at the turn around. On a better day I could have maybe tried to catch up to third, but definitely not this time. I felt terrible, sick and exhausted, and my pace was around 6:30 for the last two miles. I ran 19:59 for fourth female. And then I got Greek food at the festival, and now I can never eat Greek food again.