Shamrock Shuffle

I have to admit that I wasn't a very supportive wife over the weekend. On Saturday morning, my husband ran in the Shamrock Shuffle, a 5K race right here in Lawrence, and I didn't even go to cheer him on. In my defense, I had a wedding shower to go to in Kansas City for my friend Kristin, and it would have been difficult to go to the 8 a.m. race and still make it back home in time to get ready for my engagement in KC. I wasn't exactly dying to go watch since the temperature was 8 degrees at start time, but I certainly would have done so had I not had other important plans.

Because of the crazy cold temperature, I was extra proud that my hubby got up early for the race, which is an annual event here in Lawrence that raises money for the charities of our St. Patrick's Day parade. There were actually 386 other people who braved the frozen tundra of the levee in North Lawrence, seen here in a photo from the Shuffle slideshow. Although Chad hasn't been training for a short race like this one (he's only been running long distances and not doing any speed work), he still had a very good showing on Saturday, coming in 26th overall and 5th in his age division. The age divisions were broken into 10 year increments for this race, but if they had used 5 year increments like many races do, Chad actually would have been 2nd! There was only 1 person in the 35-39 age range that was faster than he was, so I think he did pretty well! You can see all of the race results on their website or check out the Journal-World's article if you're interested.

Chad wasn't especially satisfied with his official 5K time of 22:16, only because he ran just around 1 minute faster last summer in his previous 5K. Obviously the course conditions of last summer's race were a million times better than the conditions on Saturday. Plus, at that time he was training specifically for a 5K, doing shorter runs with weekly speed work. I think under the circumstances, he should be very proud of his 5th/2nd place finish!