2013 North Shore Cupids Love Dash

My Performance:
There are so many things that went well about this race, and perhaps one misstep.  I signed up for this race back in November while I was sidelined for for injury to my Left Iliotibial band causing a painful twinge in my knee.  Hooray for getting early registration price of $30!  At the time I couldn't run a half mile without wincing in pain, but now I have a foam roller, and use it almost every day I've been able to run long distances without any pain in the knee at all.  Since this was a training run for me I wasn't too concerned about my pace or time.  I ended up running the race in 57:33, about 9:18 pace per mile.  Official personal results can be viewed here.

Mile 1: 8:29 (WHOA! Way to fast!) but I get caught up in the excitement
Mile 2: 8:53 Still a bit faster than I know I can maintain
Mile 3: 9:19 This is more like what I was hoping for
Mile 4: 9:12
Mile 5: 10:02 when the hills started kicking my ass (more on these later)
Mile 6: 9:56The Course:
After reading the reviews on a few sites about the previous years regarding this race, I learned that some folks heard that the course was short by a few yards.  Well, it seems like the same thing may have happened again this year.  I'm not too concerned about it to be honest.  I use Nike+ Running app on my phone for pretty much every run, and it's always been very accurate regarding distance and pace feedback.  Today it registered 6.17 miles, a proper 10k conversion is 6.21 miles.  .04 miles is really not that big of a deal to me, but this happening 2 years in a row makes me wonder about the attention to detail.  If you need to change the course a bit, then do it.

I do wish I had realized how many hills were going to be in the last half of the race.  Not sure how I had the impression that it would be a flat course, it seemed like the last few miles of the course was pretty much rolling hills!


I felt they had plenty of traffic directors along the course, including some Highland Park Police officers helping to guide traffic and stop them when needed.  From reviews previous years, this looks like an improvement made this year!  Thanks for listening to those reviews (although they should have been less snarky about it).

Packet Pickup and Race Swag Bag
My last experience with picking up my own packet was with Real Racine Skeleton Skamper Half-marathon.  Much like this race it was very small and I got there early so pickup was an absolute breeze!  Running Right in Highland Park had a spot in their store and only one guy was ahead of me.  I was in and out around 5 minutes.

The pick-up bag looked like a version of the Running Right shopping bag.  Previous purchases there yielded larger shopping bags so this may be a normal bag.  Inside I found a coupon for Krav Maga Illinois coupon for 7 days of free unlimited classes.  Since it's a bit far, I most likely won't attend.  There were some advertisements, wet wipes from North Shore Medical Group and a pretty nice running technical long sleeve shirt.  Not sure why race shirts run small, but I need to start ordering a larger shirt. There was an opportunity to swap sizes, but I forgot my shirt on race day to change it.

Race day photos will be posted to Facebook once available.  I share my photos, if any on this blog.