Manchester Road Race

On Thanksgiving morning, I ran the 74th annual Manchester Road Race, along with 15,000 other people.  Manchester is the fourth oldest road race in New England and one of the top 25 races in the country.  The course is just shy of five miles and it is easy to see why the race is so popular - every square inch is lined with spectators, cheering like mad.  It was freezing cold, but I still had a great time (Lee and the girls, not so much).  I ended up finishing 2,505 out of 12,479 finishing runners (top 20%), 508 out of 5,768 females (top 8%), with a time of 39:21, which was faster than my goal of 40 minutes flat.  All in all, it was a great experience and I would love to run it again!  It was also neat to know that while I was only running with 15,000 people, thousands of other people all over the country were also running - apparently, there are more road races in this country on Thanksgiving Day than on any other day of the year (thanks JD - see, I read your tweets!).

I had a seed card for the race, which means that I ran a qualifying time in another race this year.  I had no idea how helpful this would be - it only took me about 80 seconds to get to the start line after the gun went off, rather than as long as 4-5 minutes. 

This is where I lined up.

  

Before the race. 

It was freezing so the girls spent some time hanging out in an ATM vestibule.