Laguna Hills Memorial Day 5K Race Report

On Monday, I did the Laguna Hills Memorial Day 5K with my running pal, Monique. They also had a 1/2 Marathon going on at the same time. I worked the night before, and forgot to put in to leave early. Ooops, epic fail! I was lucky and got to leave at 1:30am, which put me in bed at 2:15ish. I had to wake up at 5:45am which equals good times.

Monique and I parked in the parking structure near the race start. We both got strange looks on our faces. Why? Because the structure was completely empty. We've done this race several years. It is usually a huge race. We gathered ourselves and headed to the starting area. I immediately noticed that there was a very small amount of people there. I immediately told Monique, "LA Marathon". This is the first year that they hosted the LA Marathon on Memorial Day. I know that there was several protests about this change of date for the Marathon.

I wore my Nike Tempo Shorts, a Nike LiveSTRONG dri-FIT tank, a lululemon sports bra, and my pink Asics GT 2130's (discontinued for the GT 2140's) for the race. I'm thinking pink is going to my signature race color. It works for me. Note to self: must buy more PINK!

Had to have the Angry Julie full-body picture..

Our official pre-race photo. We do it every race.

Overall the run went pretty well. My Garmin dropped at 1.75 miles. It lost satellite signal. I was able to track the time but I lost my pace time and my total mileage. At least I got it off the format that it was stuck on for 2 weeks. I also used a new sunscreen. I've used it before during running. I had no problems with it. Of course, at Mile 3, at the very end..I got the pouring down my face, into my eyes, burning sensation. That was good times, standing over the trash can pouring water on my face.

My finish time was not as great as I wanted. Sigh. I did PR by 14 seconds from my last race, earlier in May. I ran this race last year at 35:15, this year my time was 32:01. That's got to be some kind of improvement, right? After the race, we walked around the Expo. They had all kinds of goodies for us to buy. We also had to have some photo opportunities with the Orange County Sheriff's Department.