Findlay Township Semi-Great Race 5K Event Report

Those of you who know me well and/or have for a long time know that I'll jump into race just about anywhere I can.  Solely for the fun of it and the experience of running some place new.

In the midwest, there's a lot of races on weekday evenings, especially in small towns.

So I looked just this past week to see if there were any such events between the Pitsburgh International Airport and Parkersburg, West Virginia, where I would run in the News and Sentinel Half Marathon for the fifth time.

Sure enough, there was.

And it was within five miles of the airport.

And within an hour and a half of when my plane was scheduled to land.

That part was fairly easy as we landed early, but bags coming to the carousel from United took longer than it normally does.

Getting my rental car from Enterprise and out of the garage, I was in Findlay Township and Clinton, Pennsylvania no later than 6:15 p.m.

By 6:45 p.m., I had signed up -- just $10 (Wow!), changed clothes, cleared my times from my last race (after writing them down) and headed to the start line with plenty of time.

The race was the Findlay Township Semi-Great Race 5K and it is part of the 40th annual Findlay Township Fair in The Woodlands, held in "woodsy Clinton Park".

And woodsy is a good thing.  It was really nice.

While there seemed like a few more at the start, there were 165 official timed finishers.

This race had a "hometown, old school" feel to it, which was great.

No need for a lot of announcements.  The gun was fired and we were off.

The first half mile ran through where they were holding the Fair on a paved trail.  Then the first couple of hills came.

It was basically an out and back with rollers.  You ran across State Highway 30, which was backed up with traffic in both directions, out to about the 1.8-mile mark and then haded back to the Park (just off a place that you passed on the way out).

Regarding the traffic:  Sure there had to be some mad people in those lines.  I probably would have been, especially if I had somewhere to go.

The time wasn't great (33:21.78), but work has been kicking my butt the last few weeks.  The last time I had run was last Saturday when Waverly and I completed the Lynchburg Half Marathon in Virginia together.

The miles went by in 10:44.21, 10:54.74 and 11:42.83 in the last 1.1.  I mapped it back here at the hotel in Marietta, Ohio a little while ago and it turned up 3.12 miles.  Perfect.

Totally worth doing and I would encourage it for anybody that happened to be in the greater Pittsburgh area whenever they hold it in the future.

It was my 39th race of 2015 and the 128th North American town or city outside of Texas that I've run in since 2003.