2011 Symphony of Lights 5K--Clinton, Iowa

I saw this race on runningwall.com. The race appealed to me because it was a night time race where you would run through a park with thousands upon thousands of Christmas lights. I talked my friend Tracy into doing the race with me. Around 1:15 p.m. she came by my house and we left for Clinton, IA which is almost 2 hours from my house. A bit far for a race, but this was going to be a special race with pretty lights. We got a little lost on the way to the race because googlemaps.com lead us to the South side of Clinton. We stopped at a gas station and a very kind police man told us how to get to Eagle Point park.

Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard and it was 44 degrees out so I knew it would be hard to run in these conditions. Either way, since I signed up for the race I was determined to complete it. Tracy and I arrived at the race and you couldn't park near packet pick up, you had to park outside of Eagle Point park so we had about 1/4 mile walk to the lodge to pick up our race number and shirt. I think had we realized how far the walk was, that we would have brought all of our stuff to the lodge and stayed up there, but instead we walked to the lodge to get our stuff, walked back to the car (by this time we were pretty wet), then we walked back to the lodge to start the race, then ran 3.1 miles in the rain. It was nice that by the time the race started the rain backed off a little bit and wasn't in a downpour like before. I wanted to bring my camera with me while running and get some awesome pictures of all the lights, however with the rain I was afraid I'd ruin my cheap camera so I left it in the car. Maybe next year when I do this race again, it will be better weather and I can get pictures of all the amazing lights we saw while running. If you want full results go here.  My personal results are these:  I placed 87th of 193 total people.  34th of 110 Women and 5th of 10 in my age group of 35-39.  My time was 29:24.  I considered the course hard because it was full of hills and they never stopped, the entire park was one hill after another.  I felt awesome to be able to accomplish this race in the cold rain.
Here are some pictures to enjoy:

This is a picture of Tracy and I huddled together in her car after we had walked to the lodge and back.  We were both super wet and cold.  Both of us were questioning if this was a good idea (running the race).  Since we both love running so much, we decided to run in the rain anyway.

Our race numbers.  179 is Tracy's number.  25 was mine.

After the race on the way home we stopped at the Iowa 80 truck stop to get some dinner at Wendy's.  We both had our race shirts on.