Summer Breeze 6.21.08 Recap

The Summer Breeze Road Race was held at Freedom Park last night. This race has been around for a long time and usually has good field of runners turnout.

This year, however, things were very much different.

The race title sponsorship changed hands this year. Inside Out Sport replaced Run For Your Life as the primary sponsor. Run For Your Life still did the race timings but all branding of the race was InSide Out.

And since RFYL wasn't the title sponsor, Summer Breeze wasn't a GP race.

These two factors combined to hurt the overall race turnout. This could be seen in the times recorded from Men and Women races. Last year, I ran 16:50 for an 8th place finish. This year 16:30 won the Men's race. The women's winning time was 18 and 1/2 minutes which is very respectable. I might even argue that the women's race was actuately better than the Men's race.

Having run Summer Breeze for a number of years, there was one very nice thing about this year's race over previous years. A late evening thunder storm blew through the Charlotte area just before the race. The thunder storm released more rain at once than I have seen in recent memory. Water was standing every where. While driving over to the race, the water filled the streets and sprayed out from my car like a snow plow going through a winter snow drift.

But the rain slacked off by race time. The women's race started under just a few rain drops and by the time men's race started the rain had stopped.

Stan represented for the TrySports Team and did a great job. He finished in just a few seconds over his PR of 17:42.

After the race serveral of us met at Brixx for some good pizza and the telling of running war stories. For two guys only in the 20s Chris and Cody has some of the funnest stories that you have ever heard.