Last week's weigh in and race

Continuing with my typical timely posts about my weigh ins, I weighed in last Wednesday at 168.4 lbs with a weight loss of 0.8 lbs. This small decrease in fat molecules brings my total weight loss to 6.6 lbs over the past 4 weeks. Not too shabby, and I'm hoping the fact that the weight is coming off slow and steady that means that it will stay off forever!

In exercise news, I ran my first real race in Las Vegas last Saturday. Since I've been having problems getting up in the morning to exercise, I decided to change things up and sign up for a 10k a couple of days before the actual race. The 8th Annual Northern Exposure was fairly small with only 185 people signed up for the 10k.

I didn't know what to expect since I have only been running again for the last 3 weeks, and my efforts have been pretty sporadic at best. It went better than I thought and I felt pretty strong throughout the race despite having serious allergies and spitting out nasty stuff every 5 minutes. A good portion of the race was uphill with a serious headwind, but I managed to run a respectable 1:10:39, which averaged to a 11:24 minute per mile pace.

I was very happy with this result considering my lack of training and the fact that this was only my 2nd official 10k race. At the LiveStrong Challenge last year with considerably more training under my belt and a slightly easier course, I ran 1:10:48 so it turns out that I actually ran a personal record last weekend, even if I ran only 9 seconds faster :)

I thought that perhaps with my time and small field of entrants that I might have actually placed in my age group since they were giving out medals to the first 3 finishers in each group. I learned that I may be getting a bit faster, but I'm still a far far far way from placing unless there are only 3 people in my age group! I placed 20th out of 24 women aged 30-34, so I'm still firmly at the back of the pack.

Speaking of age groups, when I registered for the race, it was the first time that I have had to publicly acknowledge that I'm 30. It was fairly strange and made me feel old. It also made me a bit sad because in the running and triathlon world the 30-34 women's age group is supposedly the toughest and most competitive age group. I better start getting even faster so I won't have to worry about coming in last.