On Sunday, I ran the Leeds Abbey Dash, a 10K charity race for Help The Aged. I originally hadn't planned on running it. Weeks ago, Larry registered and paid for the race. Unfortunately, his tdy to Germany came up. We had the race chip and the bib number sitting here all ready to go, so Larry suggested I run the race. Lately I've been feeling pretty good about my running, and Carissa very kindly volunteered to watch Ryan (I talked to a rep for the race and they said no jogging strollers allowed), so off I went.

This was the first big road race I'd run in the UK. Nearly 4000 people finished the race. I wound up around the corner from the start of the race. Once the gun went off, it took me about five minutes to cross the start. The field never thinned out, which in a way was nice. Even though I don't care much for maneuvering and having to jockey for position, having people around all the time helped me to keep a good rhythm.

The course was pretty much an out and back through some fairly unattractive parts of Leeds. At the turn around, the course did loop through a scenic park, which surrounds Kirkstall Abbey ruins. (Here are a couple of websites: http://www.kirkstall.org.uk/abbey/ and http://www.leeds.gov.uk/kirkstallabbey/. Both have photos and history.)

The race didn't have a costume category that I was aware of, but I saw a couple of men running in dresses, and a couple of women wearing flowery granny underwear over their running atire. I'm sure they had their reasons!

I felt good and ran well, finishing with a chip time of 55:11. I was pleased, considering I almost never run that far on my own. (Most of my runs are normally anywhere from three to five miles, and those are usually done while pushing Ryan in the jogging stroller.) I looked up my results online, and was amused to see that even though I'd called ahead of time and supposedly had the race entry changed to my name, I wound up having run the race as a male, under Larry's name! So I have no idea how I placed as far as my gender and age categories go. However, overall I was 2462nd of 3950 finishers.

I'm glad I ran the race. I felt good and accomplished afterwards!

~~~

(Correction - In the, "Credit where credit is due," dept.: Some time ago I credited Larry with telling me about the Harrogate Harriers. It was brought to my attention that Paula told me about them as well, very possibly before Larry did.)