On Saturday, May 16th I ran my second Operation Give Back Wounded Warriors 5K on campus at UCF. Just one year ago at this race, I met up with the East Orlando Moms RUN This Town group for the first time. I overheard Kayla mention she had a six month old, so I introduced myself and we got to chatting. It turns out our boys were only days apart and we used to live in the same neighborhood only a couple streets down from each other. Since then, Kayla and I have ran four half marathons together and several other races. We were both looking forward to this race as it was our run-iversary.

On our way to the starting line, we met up with Beata. We all were chatting about how we wanted to run a sub 30 minute race. I had ran my first sub 30 at the Lady Track Shack 5K, but the other two were going for their first. I wanted to beat my previous 5K PR.

The course was a little different than last year where we got to run through campus. This year was an out and back on the outskirts of campus, but it was perfectly fine. One good thing about an out and back course is that you pretty much see everyone who is running the race, so we got to cheer on some other mamas running both the 5K and the 10K.

We started out right on track and even had to make ourselves slow down a little bit to pace ourselves. Our splits were as follows:

Mile 1 – 9:35.5
Mile 2 – 9:08.4
Mile 3 – 8:53.2
Mile 4 – 0:43.7

Total time: 28:20.8 Overall pace: 9:09 minutes/mile

I’m so proud of these girls. Each of us set a 5K PR and by a long shot too!

Overall, this race is wonderful. It is for a great cause and it is very well put together. If Kenley didn’t have a soccer game that morning, I would have brought the whole family. There are a lot of family friendly events after the races and there is also a kids race. This will definitely be a yearly race for me.