Heather Butcher Wins Overall Female |
We arrived in the darkness of early morning. A string of cars inched their way onto the dirt road that lead to the Venice Airport Festival Grounds for the 2013 Sharks Tooth 10K. This year the race was also to be the RRCA Florida State Championships so we expected a large turnout and boy did we get one.
642 Runners took on this loop around the Venice airport which included a brief foray into an adjacent neighborhood, a small stretch on a dirt path and finished with the well known canal side bike path. The race was guided out by police officers on mountain bikes but they had to peddle fast because the lead runners quickly stretched out the field.
This year the race had a Walkers Class |
Those lead sprinters were none other than Men's Overall Winner John Wood (38:00), Master's Winner Mickey Hook (38:19) and Women's Overall Winner Heather Butcher (38:34). They were followed shortly thereafter by Sarasota's Corey Peyerk (39:04), Bradenton's Diana Sitar (39:08) and North Port's Charley Elsey (39:31).
Amazingly there were 15 runners who held a sub 7 minute pace. Their ages ranged from 27 to 59 and every one of them put on an inspirational performance.
My own journey was an unusual one. I have only run the 10k distance twice in practice so I signed up for the race back in March but had to deal with issues of foot pain. After two weeks without being able to run I finally put a pair of Orthotic insoles in my running shoes and decided it would have to be good enough.
Using split negatives I beat my fastest time by 7 minutes taking 20th in my new class (40-44) and 191st overall. My time was 57:23. The foot pain is still present so I might have to return to racing 5k races but I'm glad I competed at this race.
I have to thank my lovely wife Terri who was willing to wake up at 5am to come to this race and show her support. She took a ton of pictures and I posted them all on Facebook. Feel free to tag yourself or others.
Terri also took some video clips from the race. I took her clips, edited them together with some music and here we give you the Sharks Tooth music video. Enjoy.
Comments
Post a Comment