Last night, with fairly warm temps and a present wind, I ran the inaugural Tampa Bay Corporate 5K . The race started and finished at Curtis Hixon Park in downtown Tampa. The race was put on by Mena Shaw Races , operated by co-race directors (and my friends) Benjamin Mena and Beth Shaw . My overall takeaway from the night is that they put on a wonderful event. There was an issue with the course--it ended up being about a quarter mile long--and that might have kept me from PRing the 5K distance, but there's no real telling. Let's just say I was close at 3.1 miles. But one benefit of knowing the race directors is being able to get the back story on things like this, and it turns out the police or other city officials actually made them move the race start/finish about a quarter mile farther from where they had determined the correct start/finish point for 3.1 miles. These things happen, and it wasn't the race directors' fault. So what I can say is that I ran a PR for thi...

Almost two weeks ago now on a Friday evening, like late in the evening when I'm usually winding down for bed, I ran the Oldsmar Taphouse 5k . This year, local race director Fred Rzymek changed up this run (in its fifth year) by moving the date up and the time back--to 10pm--and adding a pajama party theme. Apparently this combo, plus the chilly temps, was a good recipe for a PR (25:16)! Perhaps wearing PJs in the cold is its own impetus for running faster, as my friend Nicole and I both finished together and ran our best 5K times! Thanks, Gap Body, for the two PJ rompers.  Nicole was getting fresh with me! This almost never happens (I didn't have to scroll down or go to the next page of results!). Here are our numbers. If we hadn't run over, we'd have probably come in under 25. But I can't do all that math. The necessary group photo (I guess some people go to bed in bow ties). We all earned beer boots! And yet Nicole and I bought wine :/ ...