This race is your typical hometown turkey trot where runners and walkers of all experience levels come out in droves to kick off their Thanksgiving Day. This year it was raining (per usual anytime I'm racing) but I always love starting off Thanksgiving with something active to do in the morning and it was less than 2 miles from my house, so it was easy to stay motivated. This race was to benefit the local food pantry and the cool thing about this race is that you can opt to either pay an entry fee ($25) or donate 25 non-perishable food items. It looks like through all of the participants, they were able to raise $20,000 and collect 2,000 pounds of non-perishable food items! So awesome!

Being someone who is used to running longer distance races, which usually consist of folks who have trained before and know road race etiquette, I had to remind myself that runners from all levels of experience participate in turkey trots. As soon as the race began I was caught behind multiple groups of walkers who were about 5-across, and while I was frustrated for a split second, I had to remind myself that this was for FUN 😂 and that everyone else was there for fun as well. So I dodged my way around folks until I was able to have some space to run at the pace I wanted to.

Since it was a shorter run, I really tried to push myself hard for speed. I definitely felt the burn, but I moved at a really fast clip for most of the race! The first half mile of the race was a downhill and the last half mile was an uphill, so my splits look insane but I managed to finish in under 29 minutes (which I haven't been able to do in YEARS), and I even placed in the top 20 of my age group! Overall really happy with how I ran on Thursday!!! 😊