Race Recap: St. Cecelia School Crusader Gallop 5K

Today was my 8th 5K race, the St. Cecelia School Crusader Gallop 5K. I wasn't able to make any improvement on my regular 5K time, finishing in 36:33. I usually try to run faster at the beginning to "make up" time for the end when I'm more worn out, but today I tried to keep a steady pace throughout to avoid having a vastly slower last third of the race, but it didn't seem to make much difference. This was an afternoon race that I did after having done two hours of very challenging classes at the gym this morning (BodyVive and BodyAttack), I'm not sure if that had some effect on my time. I have another race next Saturday morning, I'll be doing that one in place of my regular gym classes so perhaps my legs will be fresher. Today's race was in support of a local Catholic school, so there were lots of children and families running. The course was well marked and following the event there was a big picnic with wonderful food- Greek salad, baklava, boneless wings, buffalo wings, chips, cookies, sodas, etc. Everyone was very mellow about the food and actually let my "support team" (my husband and son) join in on the great meal even though they weren't registered runners. They gave out dog tags with the race name on it as finisher's medals, my first real "race swag". I'm not sure where I came in regarding my age bracket, but I think that it was fairly good. I'm in the 40-44 bracket, and the woman that I finished a few seconds ahead of came in 3rd in the very next bracket, 45-49...so to my faulty logic that means that I was close to the top 3 in my bracket too. :) I added one song to my playlist for this race,"Shackled and Drawn" by Bruce Springsteen and it was really motivating. It has a couple lines in it that are perfect for runners: "I always love the feel of sweat on my shirt/stand back son, and let a man work/let a man work, is that so wrong?" (OK, the opening line "another day older and closer to the grave" isn't exactly fitness-affirming, but I even found that one quite motivating today.) Here is a live video from two weeks ago that I found of the song, it's awesome. Shackled and Drawn Staying on WW plan has been going just fine this week so far, I have 40 activity points as of today and I've only used 3 of my weekly points. I have a real challenge tomorrow though- lunch at a Chinese restaurant. :/ We are celebrating my neice earning her GED last week, def worth figuring out HOW to eat Chinese on plan!