My town hosts an annual 5k run every Memorial Day. I usually run it, but I haven’t been running consistently in at least a year. So this year I was a spectator. A spectator with an iPhone camera and a fish eye lens attachment, that is…
Tag: race
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It was a long weekend here in the States, a holiday weekend. Memorial Day was today, which is the day we celebrate the men and women who served our country and gave their life in that service. To honor that sacrifice, our town holds a Memorial Day festival every year. And for a tiny town of about four thousand people, it’s a helluva festival.
The day goes something like this:
9:00 AM – Katie’s Memorial 5k Race
11:00 AM – Memorial Day parade
11:30-ish – General merriment and festivities on the CommonIt’s always fun, always impressive, always crowded. It starts with the race, and this year the whole family ran the race, with my younger daughter finishing second in her age group (a total surprise to all–including her). We all got the memorial shirts, and my daughter even got a glass and a custom-made cookie as the second place prize. Then the parade got under way, which starts down by the town cemetery, and eventually makes its way up the hill to the main street, and then down the main street which is always lined with spectators. And you always know when the parade is getting close to the main street because you can hear the pipe and drum core as they lead the way with the colors. It really is a fantastic parade for a tiny little town.
Here’s some photos from the day (and, yes, the sign on the back of the tractor in the last picture does indeed say “Tractors and Tiaras”):
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Want to know a killer way to wake up your sleepy self on New Years Day? Run a race. When it’s cold. Damn cold. Like, 15 degrees with a wind chill.
Welcome to the Northeast.
I ran my first race this morning. It was the annual Freezer Run put on by the Central Mass Striders. It’s a really simple course, down the street from the school where it starts, under 190, past the Sterling Airport, up around a hook in the street and back the way you came.
I finished around 49:15. That’s unofficial, since the formal race results haven’t been posted yet. But that’s the time I saw when I crossed the line, which puts my pace around 9:11-ish. For my first race, I’m extremely pleased.
Some of the highlights of the race include a guy running with two large US flags and a tri-corner hat, donuts as the post-race refreshment, a single prop plane landing one hundred feet from the road, another single prop taking up a glider, a really terrible selfie (at the request of my wife), and finishing.
Enjoy some pictures below.
The Almost part of the title of this post refers to the fact that, as of about 2PM today, I have a whole circuit upstairs that is no longer working. My wife plugged in a vacuum, turned it on, poof! No power. Not only no power, the circuit was still on, never tripped.
So I’m off to Lowes first thing tomorrow to buy a new ground fault interrupter and install it. The one the vacuum was plugged into has been running hot recently. Hopefully that solves the problem, and that I don’t kill myself replacing it. Otherwise, Day Two of the new year will be spent calling electricians.
Scott Lyerly 