Women's Series 5K

We had an exciting morning today - Sydney ran her first official 5K! I say "official" because she has run in 5K's before, but they have only been Toledo Roadrunner club events. Although they are timed events, they are not quite the same as running under that inflatable finish line arch, wearing a number, and putting that D Tag on your shoe!
In the fall we had run in a club event. She did a great job then - running the first mile and half, and then taking several walking breaks as needed. Unfortunately they had measured that course incorrectly and she ran an extra half mile, but we figured she would be running around 40 minutes on this 5K.
We started out at a pretty good pace - I let her decide how fast to go the whole time. We surprised the boys, who were working at the first water stop, by coming in way earlier than they expected. We took a few steps through the 2nd water stop (at my request - I don't like choking down water at a race!), but other than that, we ran the whole thing.
We headed down the main strip of the mall, and the finish line was up ahead. I could see that the clock still hadn't hit 30 minutes yet, but Sydney got a side stitch that was just killing her. I know exactly how she felt as I have been getting a few of those lately myself. Poor kid, she was almost in tears from the pain. So I told her to walk a few steps to work it out. She did, and then when I mentioned there was only 30 seconds left until the clock hit 30 minutes, she took off in a sprint that I could hardly keep up with!! Our official finish time was 29:50. We are all so proud of her great race!!
I would say the only bad thing about this race is that we were judged in a "Mother/minor Daugher team" category which had no other age breakdowns. So we got beat by some teams with 15 year old daughters on them! Oh well, we still kicked some butt. :)