After Jen and I took up running, our first Gate River Run, which serves as the U.S. 15k Championship, was in 2007.  I had barely started running at that point (Jen had recently completed her first half-marathon with Team In Training) and I recall smoking a cigarette in the parking lot before we walked to the start line area.  I ran the 9.3-mile course in just under two hours with a time of 1:55:42 (13:08 min/mi pace).  To illustrate the number of athletes in this event, I was the 9,209th overall finisher.  Jen came through less than 10 minutes later (2:05:05, 14:08 min/mi) and was the 9,964th overall finisher.

All of our new running friends loved the Gate and made a point of running it each year, so we did too.  In 2008, I had quit smoking and was now coaching for the Team In Training program.  Many of our friends from the program were at the Gate and I shaved almost half an hour off my race time, finishing at 1:30:35 (10:05 min/mi, finishing 4,764th overall) despite 30-40 mph winds.  We had better weather when we ran in 2009, and I finished in 1:33:34 (10:25 min/mi, finishing 5,800th overall) after running much of the course with another marathon coach.  Jen set a personal record, finishing in 1:53.  The weather was perfect for racing, cloudy and 60 degrees.

By the next year, we had just sort of lost interest in the whole rodeo associated with getting down there, getting parked, and finding a decent spot in a start corral.  I was a little burned out from having just trained for and completed a 140.6-mile Ironman triathlon.  It was rainy and cold, and we woke to our alarm, looked at each other, and basically just said “the hell with this.”

Gate traffic, backed up for miles

Since then, the Gate has become our favorite race to not run together.  We’ve made a family tradition out of not running this race each year.  It’s up to 20,000 athletes, and the walkers are undoubtedly fighting their way to the front of the start corrals ahead of runners who will probably be frustrated as hell for the first two or three miles of the course.  And that’s after fighting your way into downtown Jacksonville on a Saturday morning in traffic like what you see to the right.

In other words, we’re missing the Gate River Run again this year, but I wouldn’t say we’re really missing it.  You know?

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Feature photo by Eden Kendall, story photo by Susan Wallis, both used with permission.