The World's Best

We did it! We finished our first running race in Puerto Rico.

Yesterday Maria and I ran in the so-called World's Best 10K across the Teodoro Moscoso bridge in San Juan, PR with 7,813+ other people. It was an intense, crowded, and hot introduction to racing in Puerto Rico.

We had been training the past few months in preparation for the race but we were not quite ready when the time came to race, which for me makes it no different than any other race. Our times were respectable and an excellent starting off point for future PR's in PR. Maria finished 1860th overall, 227th out of 3044 women, and 68th out of 688 in the F26-34 group. I finished 1502nd overall, 1326th out of 4838 men, and 300th out of 1009 in the M26-34 group. As you can see Maria did much better than I did even though she finished in 58:54 and I finished in 55:57. We both could have done even better given the amount of time it took to get to the start line and through all of the walkers.

A friend of ours gave us a tip on where to park for the race and to essentially ignore the starting corral system they use to separate the various runners based on expected finish times. However, we arrived a little later than we had planned and by the time we got to the start line all of the corrals were filled. We snuck into corral 2 although we were assigned to corral 3. They had security posted at each entrance but they didn't seem to care much; they were all on their phones and let anyone who wanted into the starting corral, including the kids with backpacks full of something and no race bib anywhere in sight.

Once in the corral we just wanted to get out. It was packed and sweaty and hot. Luckily there was a slight breeze that made it somewhat bearable. We waited for 20 minutes until the start of the race.

Just before the gun went off the crowd started moving forward toward the start line. We really got packed in at that point. After the gun went off, I told Maria to take it slow until we get to the line so we didn't trip and injure ourselves, but once we got there she took off. I had to weave through the crowd to keep up with her. We were both amazed and annoyed that just 30 seconds after we crossed the line (two and a half minutes after the gun went off) we were passing hundreds of walkers. I have no way of ever understanding why someone who is fully intent on walking an event like this would ever want to be in the front, in the way of runners, being pushed out of the way and kicked and stepped on (we did not push or kick any walkers, although I may have stepped on one. Sorry.)

Anyway, we made it through the crowd and settled into our pace. We soon met a bearded man with a strange accent who told us that there are much better races in PR for posting good times. We could see from his shirt that he was a member of the local running club, Borinquen Runners. The group seems interesting and we might join them at some point.

All in all, we had a good time and feel quite accomplished. From an organizational standpoint I think they could have done a much better job, although the event expo held the two days before the race was pretty impressive, in my opinion. I may have even found a job at the expo! We will wait and see...