Godiva Track Club Run for the Donuts Race Report 2014

I did the Godiva Track Club Run for the Donuts race on October 14, 2014.   Oh my gosh, it was such a fun race.    The thing I love about their winter series events is that you just show up and pay $5 to race.   And they start at 10am so you don’t even have to get up at the crack of dawn.   They are super relaxed events that are fun, yet still get me to push myself out of my comfort zone.  Which is something I don’t do in training.

What is this Race all About?

This race is not like the Krispy Kreme challenge races.    You do not eat any donuts during the run.  They award donuts afterwards as a prize.   The way it works is you put your age and name onto a card and drop it into a bucket.   The race director randomly draws cards out three at a time and this forms teams.

The race consists of 5 laps of a cross country course, each lap being 1.1 miles.

Here is a video explaining the rules:

In case you don’t want to watch the video, here are the Rules: All three runners must run together for two laps.  Then one runner drops out while the next two runners continue together for lap 3.   Then one of those two runners drops out, and the other  runs the 4th lap alone.   Then the first runner who dropped will do lap 5 alone.    So, there’s a bit of strategy in deciding which runner does which laps.

How is it Scored?

Scoring is figured out in what they call “Donut Index” and is based on age of runners, and final finish time.  Age is a good thing here.   Unfortunately, there are alot of fast seniors in this group, so we didn’t win, but we did get 6th place out of 18 teams.  Ha, I just noticed our team number is 6 and we got 6th place. (That was purely coincidence, right?)

My Team

Here is my team #6.   Paul and Heiko were my teammates.

The Race

Here we are in lap one…

I think this is Lap #2.

I was the slower of the bunch so I dropped out here and Paul and Heiko continued.  While I waited for my turn to come up again, I jogged around the field, did some sprinting, jumping jacks, lunges and even burpees.  I wanted to keep my heart rate up and my muscles warm.  Esp since it was raining and a bit chilly.

Paul was the fastest so he did Lap 4 alone.   Then I did lap 5 alone.   Here I am tagging Paul after lap 4:

Here I am gutting it out balls to the wall at the end of lap 5.

Post Script

The cool thing about this race is the team spirit.    I raced with two guys I had never met before.   They were super nice to me, and I put myself way outside of the comfort zone because I didn’t want to let them down.    Also,   I did 9 minute miles in all three of my laps.  It was mostly flat, but a little bit of hills as we went through the trails.    Roots and rocks and some uneven terrain.  I was stoked to get such a good pace, since I usually run at 11-14 m/m.    Lots of nice people in this crowd.    I’m going to try and do all their Winter Series races this year!   Super fun, nice folks, and makes me work hard!

Happy running!