Trail Running Blog

Race Report: 5K Turkey Trot – Southern California Road Runners of Walnut

I know I’m a little late with this post, but with Thanksgiving dinner, Black Friday and the first week at my a new job, it has been really hard keeping up with the blog. But I can’t put this off any longer and I am way overdue on all of my product reviews. I admit I did contact some companies, but there is a good amount of stuff where companies contacted me on their own (which I am always grateful for), and it’s too hard to say no to free stuff.

Anyways, back to running: the 5K Turkey Trot was about a week and a half after my first half marathon, the Silver Strand Half Marathon. The 13th Annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Run was a very small race for 2K, 3K & 5K distances. It pretty much was a local race, but it was the nearest one to my LA house, and cheap enough to pay the day of the race.

Although there were a lot of high schoolers running these races, I was sort of hoping to try and place well since it was a small race. Overall time for the 5K: 20:31, but like always, I started too fast and ran out of energy early. Winners of each age group won pumpkin pies, I thought it would have been cool to bring one home to the family (even though no one likes it), but it didn’t happen. The races started almost 30 minutes later than planned, which really bothered me. The course was pretty simple, a big loop around a park, with parts on a dirt trail and the “Turkey” Hill near the middle/end. All of these little high schoolers took off early, and I tried to hang with them, big mistake! I really wanted to try and take it easy at first to have a stronger finish, but like always, I couldn’t hold back. And to make things worse, the runners that were ahead of me were pounding hard while running on the dirt trail. I literally at their dust! I kept coughing while driving home after the race. In addition to the race t-shirt, they handed out chocolate milk, although it’s probably not the best drink to have after a race, it was pretty darn tasty! I felt a lot less guilty stuffing my face with Thanksgiving food and happy to get another race under my belt. I’m hoping that the next couple of weeks, I can build up my miles and really get that stamina that I lacked in my first half to get ready for my next one in mid January.