Celtic Solstice 5 miler & Patterson Park Beer Mile 12/13/14

I've been lazy with my race reports so here's a bit of a late recap of our second effort at back to back races we did in 2013.  We really liked the Celtic Solstice 5 miler, especially the awesome race swag so we signed up again.  This year's swag was an awesome Brooks running jacket with the race logo, worth the $80 signup fee for a 5-miler.  Behold:

Back design of the  jacket

We had Adam pick up our race packets early since we wouldn't get to Baltimore late Friday night.  All we had to do was show up and run this year which was nice.  The weather was nearly identical to 2013's event- somewhere well below freezing.  We arrived with plenty of time to park and get to the starting line and stand around in the cold among the thongs of 3000+ runners. 

I wished Kristen good luck and Adam, our friend Jeff Damiano and I worked our way to the front of the herd.  We started about 10 rows back, and it worked out extremely well.  We did have to pick our way around a few clusters of people in the first tenth of a mile but we had a nice smooth start. 

My target for the race was to maintain a stead pace as close to 7 min/mi as possible.  I felt pretty good about that target and felt pretty strong.  Aside from the cold air, it was a good day for an aggressive run.  I hit mile #1 right on the money at 6:59.  Just like the prior year, at about mile 2, I saw the leader coming back and going into mile 3, just killing the race.  After the 4th mile I really started to drag and was starting to see a lot of runners pass me.  I finished as strongly as I could and did far better than the 2013 race.

I crossed the line 187th / 3060 runners at 36:47 officially, dropping a few minutes of my time from last year.  Jeff was 58th with a 32:48.  The post-race spread is pretty awesome.  Lots of normal stuff but the hot soup and hot mulled wine is pretty fantastic.  We lingered for a little while but we packed into the car to sit for half an hour in traffic to leave and prepare for the 2nd Annual Patterson Park Beer Mile.

With the first ever Beer Mile World Championships only 10 days prior, I had visions of grandeur where I ran an 8 minute beer mile.  It was going to be awesome!  We even made trophies for the race.  Our field grew by 66.7% this year.  We had 3 men and 2 women this time!  Big field of athletes!  Trophies all the way down to 2nd place, too!!

Second place trophy ("I POOPED TODAY" plastic cup) not pictured

I turned in an almost exact repeat performance and retained the title.  It's really amazing how hard it is to drink any of the beers after the first one.