2 Mile Food Pile Race
Yesterday evening I participated in the first annual “2 Mile
Food Pile” race on campus. My friend
Mike was the race director, and it was for a good cause, so why not. It didn’t really sound that hard, fill up a
backpack with 10 + pounds of food to donate to Catholic Charities, run 1 mile
with the backpack on, empty the contents in a barrel and run the mile back with
an empty backpack. Turned out the run
was a lot tougher than I thought. Having
run a hard 7 mile interval the day before, swimming afterwards, and swimming at
lunch before the race wasn’t exactly the best preparation. Not to worry, I figured I would just run easy
and make a nice day of it. All sounds
good till you line up and the gun goes off.
From there it was a mad sprint among the 60 participants. Not wanting to look too slow I took off hard as well. Only thing was my backpack was a
little too big and didn’t stay tight on my back. Basically it was moving all over the place
and really hard to run like that. Even
worse I was nowhere near the front and my competitive nature was not at all
happy about this.
Well, being the knuckle head that I am I worked hard at
catching several in front of me who went out too fast. Panting like a dog, I made it the first mile,
slung my backpack off, unzipped it and unceremoniously dumped the contents in
the barrel. In what seemed like forever
to get that done, like a bad transition in triathlon, I finally got out for the
last mile back. This time with no
excuses I still wasn’t exactly flying, but it certainly felt good to lighten
the load. With a ½ mile to go I caught
one more guy and ran on this shoulder till the finish when he left me with a sprint finish. I ended up 15th
out of the 60 participants. My friend
Mark Archenbach was the only other guy near my age and he smoked the course and
finished 7th overall.
All in all it was a fun event for a good cause. Mike did a great job of keeping it organized
and fun. I’ll be back, but maybe a bit
rested for it next year.
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