Since I am an optimistic person, I’ll start with the good about the race:

• It was another race under my belt and my first 10K.
• I ran at a pretty good speed, for me.
• Prospect Park is pretty.
• I ran it with new-friend-thanks-to-Tumblr Meghan and her awesome friend Libby.
• It is just before noon, and I’ve already done my workout for the day.
• My cabbie was adorable and decided to give me a history lesson about Brooklyn. This Manhattanite (that never gets old) by way of New Jersey and Washington, D.C. geniunely loved that at 6:50 in the morning. So amusing.
• Despite the forecast calling for rain all day, it didn’t rain this morning.

The bad:

• Started with the massive amounts of subway work the MTA has decided to do this fall. I went to get on the N/R at Whitehall to go out to Meghan’s in Park Slope, which should have been about a 20-minute-ish ride, and, of course $2.25. I walk down the steps to the subway, and the N/R just flat-out isn’t running from there. OH… so my $2.25 subway ride turns into a $15 cab ride.
• I ring Meghan’s buzzer, and I hear a ridiculously loud thud. I actually got kinda nervous. Then Meghan’s head pops up and she opens the door. Turns out she totally wiped out running to the door and hit her head on the door. I hope she’s okay 🙂 She ran anyway.
• Prospect Park? Pretty…PRETTY HILLY! It felt the entire time like we were either running up a hill or down a hill.
• Yes, it didn’t rain, but it was also ridiculously humid. I had worn pants and a long-sleeved tee under my race shirt and I was pretty steamy by the time I was done.
• My Nike+ says I ran 11.72K. Yeah. It was a 10K. NIKE FAIL. (Clearly my baby iPhone would never fail.) Side note — I guess I should callibrate it. That all messed with my run the entire time, since it was a good amount off. It would say “5K,” and I hadn’t even gotten to 3 miles yet. That was my first indication it was off.
• The food and beverage selection at the end was pretty meh. I did try coconut water, and I wasn’t all that impressed by it. I was way more impressed by the chocolate-chocolate chip muffins at the Army Ten-Miler. What? It’s not about the food at the end? Oh…
• They tried to cram way too many people into too small a space at the end.
• They had a kiosk set up to check out your race time…that didn’t work.
• So we watched a monitor to find out our times, and it went to a slideshow after we had been standing watching it scroll through the sub-60:00 finishers for about 15 minutes.
• That time above is the gun time, not the chip time. For those of you that haven’t run races, unless you are an elite runner, your time is not the gun time. It takes you a few minutes to get to the start. My Nike+ may have been wrong on the distance, but I think the time was right: 1:00:45. Hopefully Nike will release gun/chip results too.

Just Weird:

• The girl wearing bright yellow booty shorts that matched the shirt. (I passed her. Ha! You may have junk in your trunk, but I can run faster :))
• Thousands of people wearing the same red shirt. I remarked that I felt like we were either marching to our graves or it was some sort of experiment set up by Kim Jong-Il to show us how blindly consumerist we Americans can be.  Either way, it felt very cult-like.