To kick off a jam-packed weekend, I ran the Hudepohl 14K Brewery Run on Saturday morning. As I mentioned before, I planned to run the race with my dad and also had convinced a few others to join us for the fun.

Ted, Corinne, me, my dad, and Melissa before the race.

The morning started off cool meaning perfect running weather. Despite a little disorganization, I enjoyed the race very much. It seems that some race volunteers didn’t show up on time, which I think delayed the start of the race about ten minutes. That wasn’t really a big deal, though it threw off the times I gave to our spectators along the route. Also some of the bands were still getting setup as we ran past, but I’ve seen this happen with a variety of races. The biggest issue, though it didn’t impact me, was that they forgot to put out the signs for the 7K turnaround point, or if they were there it wasn’t easy enough to see. I saw many people lost on the course and some ended up running the full 14K even though they registered for half of that.

Me and my dad on the course.

We all started off in a pack together, running even faster than the 8:30 pace that I had told everyone. We also had a few others in the group not pictured above that helped bump up our initial pace. My dad commented that he didn’t think he’d be able to hold the sub 8:00 pace, but we did. For some reason my results from my timing chip aren’t online, but my dad’s results say 1:09:19 total, or 7:59 pace, though according to our GPS watched we ran even faster than that. Since I ran the whole race with him, I’ll assume my time would be the same. This would be good enough for 24th place out of 102 in my age division. My dad’s results say 255 out of 1393, and 12th of 44 in his division. Speaking of my dad’s running, he is officially registered for next year’s Boston Marathon. I can’t wait to see him run this race.

We earned our medals!

After crossing the finish line we were given these nice looking medals. The after party was hard to gain access to at first, as they setup the food and beer booths inside their old warehouse. Eventually we were treated to a couple of free beers, a commemorative pint glass, and some free food samples. I enjoyed running the longer than normal distance and hope they work some of the kinks out and decide to hold the race again next year.

Hanging with the Little Kings mascot.