That was a mess - but a fun one, and a fun race.

Bun Run 2004 was the first race I’d ever entered that actually had a K9 entry option. Since I love running with da pup, he’d never had a chance to race, and he always gives me that look whenever I go out and race without him, I thought that we’d give it a go. I knew ahead of time that this would just be a fun run, not a real race, but still… Oh, and when I got my shirt at packet pickup, they had a red bandanna for him. Too cool.

I don’t know how many total people there were, but it was a lot. All of the people with dogs or strollers had to line up at the very back of the pack. Yup, behind the walkers. So I took my 8:00 (goal) mile self and got in behind the largest, slowest pack of people I think I’ve ever seen - well, except for those at the Capital 10K. It took us a few minutes to get to the starting line, and we weren’t even really running then.

The first mile was painful. I couldn’t even think about pace, all I could do was try to not have either of us - or the leash - get in anybody’s way as we tried to weave our way through the, literally, thousands of people ahead of us. It was a little bizarre. There were other dogs and strollers trying to do the same thing, which made it even more interesting. We were weaving around cones, taking long-cuts through road construction, running on the grass verge, whatever it took. Even with all that, it went by at an 8:41 pace, which surprised the heck out of me when I saw it (all times are ForeRunner times). That’s a little misleading though, because we did so much weaving back and forth (so its less than 1 linear mile). Even with that though, it seems better than I would have expected. We probably did more like a 9:00 pace for a straight-line mile.

The next mile was an out-and-back on Cesar Chavez. We were able to run on the “wrong” side of the track a little bit, as very few runners had come the other way. I did get to see Alex (or rather, he saw me and yelled out), he looked like he was doing very well, doing about a 7:00 pace. The loop around was brutally crowded, I was running on the grass for most of it as well - not good for the time, but better than dealing with the crowds. At the two mile point, I saw the water stop (I’d completely missed the one-mile stop in the crowd). I was going to stop and let Bear drink, but it was too chaotic, so I just poured a cup of water onto his head. A volunteer dumped another one onto his back. He seemed surprised, but it helped, so we kept running. I just wish I’d had some left for myself. Mile two was over in 8:23.

After two miles, the crowds were thinning out nicely but Bear was beginning to lag a bit. The third mile was pretty uneventful, but a little slower back at 8:38. At one point near the end as we were crossing the river, I saw another dog coming up behind and told Bear that he needed to pick up the pace, “He’s in our age group.” Got a laugh from some of the other runners, but I don’t think that my pup really understood the whole “race” concept. Still, its his first time out.

My watch got us doing 3.18 miles total (with a lot of weaving), and we still had enough of a kick for the last .18 to do a 7:20 pace up Riverside to the finish line. I tried to do good high kicks whenever we saw a camera, so we may get some decent pictures out of this one. All told, we did the 5K in 27:00.9 for an 8:39 average pace. Which is not bad, considering that we started as far in the back as we did.

I just realized. That was less than 10 seconds slower than my previous PR at Burnet, and definately crowd- and dog-limited. I am getting faster. This is too cool. Oh, and the results are in now - we came in 16th out of 57 dogs.

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