Do You Wanna Eat Some Watermelon….

 

Before I go into the final leg of the Summer Sunrise Watermelon Series Let’s first cool down this summer and talk about the running of my Frozen Virtual. Unlike the past few years I hadn’t planned on doing the Summer Virtual Disney runs at all since I had run three of the four weekends of the 2021-2022 season Live in parks, however when the medals were displayed at the Expo of Springtime Surprise I was swayed to run just one of them.

My course of choice was the same lake as Watermelon and so I am basing my pace and goals based on that series…
My OOTD was my “Just Let It Go” top made for when I did a Comfy Princess Squad inspired Elsa look at the 2019 Wine and Dine 10K as well as my black skirted Livi Leggings and a pastel rainbow bondi band




I didn’t look at the weather at my start but it was in the 75-77 range when leaving the house.

There were no formal mile markers so I am marking when my fitbit hit that point.

I hit mile one in 17 mins -same as June a minute slower than July

I hit mile two in another 17 mins (34 elapsed) -a minute slower than June same as July

I hit mile three in another 15 mins (51 elapsed) on par with previous Watermelons

And finished in 53:04 so pretty consistent as it was only four seconds longer than June watermelon and three seconds longer than July’s







And now for the main event the final leg of Watermelon….

Honestly I was not mentally prepared for running this event as there have been some personal stuff going on in my life and I didn’t know if I would be in a great headspace…. However to paraphrase Legally Blonde exercise gives you endorphins and endorphins make you happy and as long as I was able to cross the finish I’d be a happy camper.




So, to start because my head was all over the place I only ended up having one bottle of water frozen so that was the one I carried and so I did not have a back up bottle cooling my back. Thankfully it was a ‘cool’ 77 at the start of the race.

My OOTD was a green and white tie dyed print Livi skort/tank set with my watermelon bondi




I arrived at the parking lot about 5 minutes later than I did for previous races though thankfully I made it to my wave area in time. As I arrived in my fave all I could smell was a strong floral sent (Gardenia or Jasmine according to fellow runners conversing around me) which brought me to sniffle slightly. While I was praying my allergies wouldn’t be my undoing I made another contradiction observation. I swear that the race materials state that strollers will be at the end however yet again I want to gripe about runners pushing double strollers PHYSICALLY SEEDED in waves 6-8 out of 10 waves… I was in 9 for the record. In addition to the smell and pondering about the strollers the surrounding lake area was quite buggy however there wasn’t much time to swat the fleas flying around because waves soon began to move up.

I found it quite interesting as I approached the start for one of the course marshals to be calling out over a megaphone “This is for wave eight…wave nine and ten pull over to the right and don’t cross yet”
I waited my turn and was off…for a moment…

At 0.19 miles my music suddenly paused and as I slowed to fix it I was dreading my phone playing the game it likes to play at times where music will pause or skip or siri will come on at random intervals because unlike a training run this was the real deal…though skipping music would of been a better issue than what lay ahead…

About three minutes into starting I did my first pass of the finish area and noticed that my fitbit tracker had paused….I unpaused it and kept moving and it paused one more time before I had to pull toward the right to tie my shoe 0.53 miles in…

FIVE more timer pauses later I finally reached mile marker ONE… it was 15 minutes (a min faster than June and 2 faster than July/Frozen) with my fitbit saying I’d only gone .90 miles due to all the pauses…

It paused TWO more times before my fitbit actually told me I made it a mile and this was about a minute before I hit the merge point onto the running path from the road (with a time on par with July)

FOUR MORE fitbit app pauses and I was at the water table (a minute less than July)

ANOTHER app pause and I reached mile marker TWO… in looking at my notes this was a minute longer to get between marker 1-2 than June and the same time between as July & Frozen YET the elapsed time was two minutes quicker somehow…at this point my FitBit clocked me as running 1.86 miles

It took another three minutes for my fitbit to tell me I ran two miles followed by SIX more fitbit pauses before I reached what I affectionately relate to as sign ally once more



There was one more pause before I reached the second merge which was two minutes less than I reached this point in July…

There was no marker 3 or else I was too preoccupied with the TWO more app pauses to see one before I found myself crossing the finish with a time of 51:08 which definitely shocked me seeing that it was a good two ish minutes less than June, July, Frozen making it my summer racing season PR though still a solid nine minutes longer than my actual 5K PR set in 2019





UPCOMING RACES:
Foam Glow 5K 10/8
Wine & Dine 5K 11/4
Wine and Dine 10K 11/5
Hot Chocolate 10K 12/18
Gasparilla 15K 2/25
Gasparilla 8K 2/26
And Pending Making It into Registration I’m heavily leaning into doing Springtime Surprise in April just look at these themes






Marathon a month
July 7:43:41
RUN THE YEAR


July is the last month of the FitLife challenge however I will still be posting the badges earned from my regular Run The Year Challenge as well as any Streaker Series Milestones I may earn

MILE Wise I’m 1274.90/2022 miles moved

RACE AROUND WDW CHALLENGE
69.27 miles since I’ve started… I’ve had to re-start this challenge as I’ve completed the course and so of the above listed time 6.2 is from my second loop around the world… here is where I’m at




PRs
1M {15:26} 3K {30:59} 5K {42.46} 8K {1:13:59} 10K {1:42:52} 15K {2:19:09} HALF {3:54:55} FULL {7:08:15*} *virtual full run in increments