San Diego Fair 5K Race Report

I seem to always run a short, fun race the week after a tough, long race. This is actually ideal though since I’d rather get the hard one out of the way first so I can enjoy the easier one. The San Diego Fair 5K is a fairly new race that takes place around the Del Mar Fairgrounds, where the San Diego Fair takes place. It’s a little different to run through the fairgrounds before they open so you don’t experience all of the crowds, rides, attractions and deliciously fried foods. One of the perks for running this race is that it acts as a ticket to the fair for the day as well as discounts for others as well as a free entry to the fair another day. So the event website said that there would be timing chips, but we did not get them in our race packet. Most people do take this race as a fun race anyways, but I usually run it pretty hard and would have liked an official race result. But according to my phone, I ran an 18:45 but Endomondo only recorded 2.86 miles! It definitely wasn’t 3.1 miles, although the phone might have missed the part where we ran underneath a bridge, but I’m pretty sure it was still under 3 miles, so no PR this time. 

We didn’t walk to the start line until others had already started gathering there. I didn’t want to squeeze my way to the front, so I decided to just start farther back than usual and work my way to the front. That’s pretty much what I did, I think I was running in the 5-minute pace for the first 10-20 seconds. That may or may not have affected me for the rest of the race. It’s hard to tell with a 5K, since I’m usually tired the whole time. The course was exactly as it was described. We ran through all of the closed rides and food stands as well as on the race track, fortunately it wasn’t as hard as other race tracks I’ve ran on in the past. The weather was actually pretty warm out and got quite sunny by the time I had finished the race. This would have been a very tough half marathon to run!

The problem with running so early in the morning was that we had to wait for the fair to open after running our race. We would have had to wait about an hour before it opened. And since I had to drive up to LA later that day, I decided to just skip the fair and try to avoid as much of the weekend traffic as possible, while trying to stay awake since I wouldn’t have my usual post-race nap.

My next race is either the Scripps Ranch 10K, which I ran for the past few years but stopped recently. Or if I skip that one, it’ll be another destination race in Chicago!