Smoke The Turkey 5k

This morning I took a quick break from helping in the kitchen watching the Macy’s parade to head down and run the Smoke The Turkey 5k with one of my best friends.

13 years ago, also known as the summer before my sophomore year of high school, one of my friends approached me about joining the cross country team. In order to compete at our city championships we needed 5 members and they were a few short. I decided to give it a try.

In my three years on the team I made it through about 2.5 seasons. Between ankle injuries and other problems I wasn’t the most successful member of the team by far. My high school PR was 28:10 and I achieved it on my very first race my sophomore year.

My friend went on to run marathons while I went on to other things. She took a break for the last few years and started back up this summer. I started back up this year too. I noticed our hometown had a Smoke the Turkey 5k race on Thanksgiving. It’s one of the only weeks of the year were both in town so I emailed her and we signed up! Our first race together in 12 years!

It was a really fun and really well organized race! I think it is safe to say that I “smoked my pr” while racing the Smoke the Turkey race. I had set the PR at Race For the Cure earlier this year!

Smoke The Turkey 5k Results

My time was 24:32 and was 40 seconds faster than my most recent 5k PR, I was shocked! I even pulled off negative splits. They were as follows:

I was super excited with the results and had a lot of fun. I did run into one issue. In the cold weather my phone decided it didn’t want to work so it died before the race, my first time in a long time running without music! Luckily it was a very community oriented race and there were lots of people out with music watching and cheering on the runners. It really doesn’t get better than that.

It’s safe to say that a 5k goes by a lot quicker than a half marathon!

Happy Thanksgiving friends! Time for that extra slice of pie!