Date: June 29th; 8:30 am
Distance: 5mi
Place: Central Park, NY, NY
Weather: 78 F, 71% Humidity (it sure felt warmer than 78 F)
Finishers: 10,236 (4,715 Men/5,521 Women)

This race is a yearly race, which is organized by the NY Front Runners, which closes out  LGBTQIA+ Pride Month. Just an FYI, the NY Front Runners is one of the running clubs that I rarely to never run with. Perhaps that will change soon.

It marked the 50-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising in NYC during the late 60s. With the 10,000+ finishers, this race set a new Guinness World Record title for the largest pride charity run. The previous title was set with 6,000 finishers. I was surprised that the previous record was so low.

At the beginning of the race, the announcer mentioned that "today is not a day to PR," and boy was he right. During the first mile, you could definitely feel that everyone was running pretty cautiously because of the heat. For the first 2.5 miles, I did feel kind of strong. Not great, but I was not a complete mess. After the first hill, I started to feel very lightheaded/dizzy and decided to walk . . . a lot. Most of the east side of Central Park was pretty sunny and bright, and it was quite obvious that my body was overheating.  I pretty much could not recover after this - even once we transitioned into the shadier west side of the Park. I think my mile 3 split was about 13 min. Since I knew that I had a few inclines left after the big hill, I decided to change up my strategy a bit and walked the declines and (slowly) ran the inclines. At every fluid station, I threw 3 - 4 cups of water  (at least) on my head to help cool off. Hell, I may have even screwed up my phone. Since I'm still rocking an iPhone SE, I guess it's time to get a new phone anyway. 

Even though this was a pride run, I was not very proud of my performance. But hey, I finished . . . barely.