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Wulf at the Ukrop’s Monument Avenue 10k

Yesterday morning, as promised, I ran the Ukrop’s 10k race in Richmond. I and over 25,000 other people. It didn’t quite go according to plan - I lost track of my coworkers very early, as the guys got competitive and took off. A few of them didn’t even start in the same wave as the rest of us – the race was split into 16 waves, the last being walkers. I probably should have been in the 6th wave, but instead registered for the 13th and started in the 15th, thinking that our group might stick together at least for the first couple of miles. Then the two female teachers I thought I was pacing just disappeared. I’m sure that at some point I “took off” from their point of view.

But still, the race was fun. Since I wasn’t fretting about hitting any particular time, and since most of the race was along beautiful Monument Avenue, I slowed down in several places to take some pictures. I even stopped for a couple of minutes to talk to a coworker who wasn’t running but had come out to show her support. Actually, that happened twice – once at the beginning of the 4th mile and once just before the end of the 5th mile. Those happen to be the only two miles where my split time was over 9:30, so I estimate that my official time of 64:11 should have been a little under an hour, even with the picture taking. Definitely not the 45 minutes I wondered about in the last post, but as I said that’s not what I was there for.

Here is a photo of the starting line, seconds before my wave was released:

Each runner’s official time is kept by a chip we tied to our sneakers. Crossing the start line gives an official start time for each runner, and obviously there are monitoring strips at the finish line as well. Note that the race winner had been done for nearly half an hour before I even got to start. That’s all I could think about while the sea of runners around me stretched and waited to go – “There are people finishing right now.”

And then we started. A little more than a mile into the race was the Stonewall Jackson monument. On the bottom left you can see people from earlier waves who were approaching the 5-mile mark coming the other way:

The only other photo of a monument that came out well was that of Arthur Ashe, taken just after the 4-mile mark.

The inclusion of an Arthur Ashe monument on Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue has always made for a good story, imho. It was unveiled in 1996, and is the only monument to be added to the avenue since 1929. The other monuments are all of white men involved in the Confederacy, so it’s easy to see why the decision to include Ashe’s statue was controversial. It is my understanding that everybody opposed putting the statue here, so the city put the statue here.

Also, it has been noted by many that the visual message of the statue is somewhat unclear. Dale Franks explained it well in this hysterical article from a few years ago. Anyway, I think I got a decent photo of the Ashe monument.

All along the course there were people cheering and bands playing music, which was really nice.

There were probably more than 20 different bands, including several who set up on the grassy median. Since the race went both directions on Monument, we got to enjoy those acts twice. In this shot I am past the turnaround point, and on the left you can see runners/walkers from later waves heading the other way.

The bands were great – I can’t imagine what the run would have been like without them. In fact, I’d really like to thank all of the race volunteers - the musicians, those supplying water and sports drinks along the way, those handing out food at the end, those collecting timing chips, and the ones behind the scenes who I don’t even know about. I look forward to doing it again next year.

One last photo… here’s the finish line from a runner’s point of view:

Afterwards, my fellow teachers joined me for some lunch in Carytown, which is a hip and artsy little section of Richmond just a few miles from where this race was held. In fact, it is the site of my next race, the Carytown 10k on May 20. I think I am going to take my time on that one more seriously.