Castle Rock - 5K

I was looking forward to this race close to my house in the Los Gatos mountains. The sun shone down warmly on this late November day. I chatted with Steve Sokol, who was there with his trail-racing 7 year old son Alex. Steve had finished first to my second at both the QuickSilver 10K in San Jose and another Redwood Trails run at Big Basin. He congratulated me on my third place finish in the Trail Runner Trophy Series. Last year I had started the 10K along with the 5Kers because I had shown up late. The 5Kers included the UC Santa Cruz cross country team. I was relieve to not see them here this year.

They started the 10 milers and 10Kers first. I took off like a shot taking the lead and before too long ran into the back of the 10K pack. This is an unfortunate way to organize the race. It took a while to worm my way past all of them (some of them wearing iPods!). But I felt great the whole time and after the turnaround saw that I had about a minute on Steve. I finished strong in 24:45 still about a minute ahead of other finishers. A fun race.