Some Retractions and Corrections: Bad Results for this past weekends 5 km race and Great Urban Race

The clock as I am approaching the finish at the White Oak Classic...anyone else see that it says 24:11??? Yeah, apparently it's a mirage (at least based on a prelimary printout of the timing/ranking of runners). On a postive note regardless of time, I still came in 3rd in my gender/age category

Taking some time to eat an ice cream by a bronze sign. Note: we are not just loitering in this picture. The bronze sign was a clue we had to photograph (with us sitting on the bench) and the ice cream was a challenge we had to accomplish (we had to bring a popsicle stick back with us to the finish line). But clearly we should not have gotten so comfortable and relaxed in this picture but should have made it an action sitting shot to save some time). You will see in a few moments why this picture illustrated our failure and demise at the Great Urban Race (GUR) so well!

So it is late in the evening for me, but it is with a heavy heart that I have two pieces of bad news about my recent events. No, they did not test me for caffiene and find I had more than the legal limit (is there a legal limit for caffiene?? Because if there is, perhaps I have violated it. But alas I love the Diet Dew).

It has to do with my 5 km time on Friday and the Great Urban Race on Saturday.

If you inspect the above picture you will see my "finishers shot" (the picture I take as I finish a race). It says 24:11. Thus I publicly announced this was my finish time. Well apparently the unofficial race report that my husband had gotten ahold of suggest my time is 25:11. This is still respectable and a PR since getting hit by the car. But it is not 24:11!!! On a positive note, breaking this PR has now become a bit easier to do.

Now for the second bit of bad news. Tristan and I competed in the Great Urban Race with expectations of greatness. Hahahahaha!!! Well, okay we thought between the two of us we had two Ph.D.'s had run a few times in DC so had a basic knowledge of the lay of the land and a decent strategy (look at the answers of other competitors and figure out who looked smart and copy off them).

Unfortunately even with glasses my vision is not very good and Tristan had a lame leg so we could not shadow other competitors as well as we hoped (oh yeah and the side trip to Robeks for a smoothie, EMS to check out some mountaineering equipment and Pacers for some running equipment might not have helped in shadowing other competitors...why couldn't any of them take this 40 minute detour??!!!).

Well anyway, today we recieve the official results of the Great Urban Race via e-mail and we DNF'd!!!! What the $#%($#*????

Rereading the rules (because we do not accept defeat in our family), all I see is that we had to be back at the start/finish by 5 p.m. (which we were by most other clocks...see yesterday's post about "Tammy Time Zone" which is slightly off everyone elses time. And the rules suggest you get a 30 minute penalty for every missed clue.

What they do not ever state is that you must finish the race including accumulated penalties within 5 hours. In fact at one point when Tristan and I were about to become Lisa and Bart from the Simpson's pounding each other in Downtown DC (in front of the White House where I'm sure we would not have attracted any attention). We talked about altering our strategy to just bail on the clue finding and take the 30 minute penalty. This was about 3:15 p.m., but we were short 5 clues (of which 2 could be missed even by the GUR regulations). We decided to tough it out and got 2 more clues subsequently but this took us close to 2 hours. Had we known about the 5 p.m. and 5 hour regulation we might have changed our strategy and not DNF'd. I cannot accept a DNF next to my name.

But now I am going to attribute the DNF to Tristan because he really sucked our team down. Yup, that makes me feel better....