Good practice

Alan directed his first official 5k on Saturday. He decided to offer a free race as a way to advertise the running league and get some practice as a race director. About 150 runners/walkers came out. Amazingly enough, the race was rain free! (A down-pour started an hour after the race finished and continued the rest of the day - making it one of the rainiest Nov 7th's on record for Portland. Yuck!) It was pretty cold and windy and those of us doing registration had a hard time keeping our papers from flying away. Next time, we'll use clip-boards. Alan and I learned a lot and have a list of things to do differently in January when the league officially starts, but everything went quite smoothly and Alan is pleased. He has received lots of positive comments and a few new running league registrations from runners.

Thanks so much to Alan's great parents and two sisters who got up REALLY early on a Saturday to help!


Here's the registration table - where I stayed most of the time. It was hard to flip through stacks of race bibs with frozen fingers.






We didn't get any great pictures of Alan, but he did an awesome job organizing and directing. I don't get to see him plan and take charge of big groups like this very often, so I'm always impressed when I do.






And they're off! The winner finished in just over 16 minutes, and he wasn't even planning on running the race until about 10 minutes before it started! He had come to the race to sell gloves from his running store, but decided to run to keep warm. Check out that sunrise!