Ventura 5K Race Recap
Last weekend we had the opportunity to run the Ventura 5K as a family. It’s been a while since Henri ran a race with me and it was a lot of fun to get out there all together again!
We drove up the morning of the race which meant an early wake up call, but the drive from our house to Ventura was very easy early on a Saturday morning. We got to the race course, checked in, got our bibs, and used the porta-potties no problem. We headed up to the starting line with about 10 minutes to go to do some warm-up exercises – Henri hasn’t been running much and since I wasn’t racing it we didn’t jog a warm-up, but if there were amble areas to get in a good warm-up if someone was looking to do that.
The field was fairly small which was nice when you are running with a stroller. We got in the corral just a few minutes before the race and they started us right on time! Since we started at the back it took us about a minute to cross the start line… we probably should have positioned ourselves better but we always feel a little awkward maneuvering through the starting area with the stroller.
The course goes along a 1 mile stretch of road – you run out straight one mile, do a u-turn, run back .5 mile do another u-turn and loop through the same course again before heading straight out to the finish line. The original plan was to run the whole race together but at the 1.5 mile u-turn Henri and I noticed that I was the 5th place female… not taking into account the fact that it had taken us nearly a minute to cross the starting line. He turned to me and said “you should try and see if you can catch 3rd place!” I was feeling good and a challenge sounded fun so I went for it!
I caught the 4th place woman pretty soon after that and then spent the last, downhill mile consistently picking up the race to try and reel in the next woman ahead of her. I caught site of her when we were about 400m from the finish line and knew that I was within a minute of her but kept pushing the pace to see if I could physically pass her – which didn’t end up happening.
The amount of people spectating was relatively small but they were great at cheering everyone into the finish line and each person that realized I was pregnant got so excited for me which was fun! My official finish time ended up being 22:12 and I was the 3rd place female overall. Henri ran fast the rest of the race and he and Liv finished in 24:47.
Just like the Orange County race, Ventura had some lawn games out to enjoy after the race and Liv had a lot of fun playing corn hole and the giant Connect4 game that they had in the kids’ area.
We enjoyed the free waffle breakfast and hung around to cheer on the men’s and women’s downhill mile before heading home. We have a couple more races coming up this fall that we are going to run together and this just made me even more excited for them!
It was such a fun, family morning and I’m looking forward to be able to run in the half or full marathon option one of these years soon!
I am so thankful to the LaceUp Series for allowing me to participate as an ambassador for their race series this year. I was provided free entry to this race in exchange for sharing about my experiences but all the thoughts and opinions above are my own.