Lookin' Good Shamrock Strut 10K

This start corral scene still needs more green.

After my feel-good time at Rodeo Run last month, I was a bit curious about how I might do on a flatter course. Well, I found out this morning's fundraiser for the Houston Eye Foundation.

The splits:
Mile 1 - 10.46
Mile 2 - 10:40
Mile 3 - 10:23
Mile 4 - 10:20
Mile 5 - 10:35
Mile 6 - 10:15
Last .26 - 2:26
10K elapsed time - 1:05:24 (per Forerunner 110)

I haven't clocked a 10K that fast since 2009, so the green beads I was wearing must have been lucky charms. The funniest moment of the morning came shortly before I reached the mile one marker, when I overheard one girl grumble, "Eww. Eww. Eww. I, like, so need a shower now. See, this is why I don't do outdoor sports."

Yeah, I suppose it was a little humid. We've only reached March, though. Poor thing.

I'm in a geeky mood, so the rest of this post gets dedicated to a couple of tech debuts. Only the insanely-devoted readers of my blog would have noticed, but I recorded today's splits with a new Garmin Forerunner. The Enter button on my ol' 205 has cracked rubber and went intermittently responsive. So after 3-1/2 years, I decided to retire it in favor of the 110, Garmin's new base model GPS for runners. The latch on the wristband is wide, which I think will make it less likely to tear through the wristband notches. Also, the device has been shrunken down to the point where it looks like an ordinary digital watch. Indeed, it even has a "sleep mode" where all it does is tell time. It might be a while before I can get used to the idea of a Garmin as an everyday accessory though!

The other geeky item of note from this morning is that the timing crew used back-of-bib tags I've never seen before, attached using double-sided foam tape. The sensor equipment was mounted on the arch above the start and finish lines, so that probably explains why our instructions heavily emphasized wearing the bib numbers up on the fronts of our shirts. (Coincidentally, this makes the race photographer's sorting job easier later, too.) Do these work better than shoe-mounted chips? I don't know, but the manufacturer has a slick cat logo, so that's got to help.

It's such a shame about that Mayan-end-of-world-thing, because the 2012 running year is looking like a good one so far.