Butte to Butte 4th of July 10k

Happy 4th of July everyone!

It was an entirely too early start this morning, especially after another late night Mexican run last night. As far as I'm aware of Burrito Boy treated everyone much better than Muchos Gracios did. The Burrito Boy passed the standardized test for most Mexican restaurants: Mexican music and the local Mexican people! Muchos Gracios had neither, which should have been the red flag.

I got up at 5:30 a.m. this morning to get things around and catch the bus to the start of the Butte to Butte 10k race. 7,000 people showed up this morning to compete in the country's largest 4th of July 10k race. Things went pretty well considering my training has been suspect the past 3 weeks or so. I ended up finishing 3rd overall, a couple seconds behind 2nd and quite a ways behind 1st. The winner was Brett Schoolmeister, who was a national caliber runner at Colorado a few years ago. The spoils of 3rd place are alright though: $200, a nice Butte to Butte pullover, a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the last item mentioned, other than they are already improving the smell of our room!

This race was kind of crazy in a way. It started off with a long climb up this huge hill for the first mile. I went through the mile in 5:31. The second mile was back down the other side of the hill and I went through the two-mile in 9:56 - so that was a brisk 4:25 second mile haha. The rest of the race was pretty flat and I felt pretty comfortable.

Afterwards I cooled down with the winner from Colorado. I also finally talked to Bridget Franek for a bit. She runs for Penn State and is originally from Ohio. I see her all the times at meets, but have never talked to her. Nice girl.

Funny story from last night's walk home from Burrito Boy. We see about 25 cops surrounding this house, which is actually a classroom building on campus, so we decide to park it across the street and take it all in. The cops suspect that the man inside has broke into the building. The four of us - Brad, Adam, Andrew and I - can see this man just chilling in this room; it looked like he was just watching tv or something. Then a few minutes go by and this lady who is a custodian came up behind us and identified the man as Dave Grace, a fellow custodian. The great thing is the cops have no clue that this guy is supposed to be in the building. He finally comes out of the building and the cops yell at him to show them his hands. The cops realize they goofed up big time and we could hear them apologizing to everyone with their walkie talkies. Talk about hilarious! Guess you had to be there :)

So excited for the distances races tonight! Men's 10k, Women's 5k and semi heats of the men's and women's 1500.