I’ve never really been into New Year’s Resolution. In fact, I can’t remember ever creating one except perhaps for an assignment in elementary school and this year isn’t all that different. Late last year, I realized that I run significantly more (and more regularly) when I have a race I’m preparing for so I thought I should try to register for more races. I started looking at the online race calendars and noticed that most months had at least one interesting or fun sounding race. Maybe I should run a race every month.

I had this idea in late November or early December, but no one asked me about it then so I kept it to myself. Of course everyone has to ask about Resolutions around the first of the year so instead of my regular answer of, “I figure you can change anytime you want and there’s no significance to the New Year, so I didn’t make any,” I decided to tell a few people about running these races. Well, turns out that Dom thought this sounded good and now we’re both doing it.

Attempt 1: I decided the best way to start in on this pseudo-Resolution was with an early race and there was one New Year’s Day. I hadn’t trained for it which sort of defeated the whole point but I had been running and I was going to do it. Checked the web the night before for start time (noon), ate an early breakfast, put on my running shoes and went out in the 8 degree weather for a “fun run.” Unfortunately, when I got there, they were taking everything down. Turns out the site I looked at was wrong and the race started at 10. Oops, not a great start to the running year. Oh well, there was one more race in January.

Attempt 2: The only other race in the area in January was the Freezeout Hill Challenge last weekend. We both got up and drove out to Emmett in the freezing fog that morning, got a little lost, but eventually found the race. It was a small group, only about 100 runners between two distances. We both ran the longer race which was supposed to be 6.5 miles but they said was more like 6.6 or 6.7. The toughest part was the middle which was about 1.5 miles of continuous hill climb followed by another 1.5 miles back down. By then we were all warm, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at the runners, everyone had moisture from the fog frozen in the tips of their hair which looked pretty cool in the finisher photos.

Anyway, Dom and I both did well. We each took third in our age divisions and I was 11th overall. The best part of the race was the snacks at the finish. They had vegan chili. (And it was intentionally vegan rather than vegetarian that happened to also be vegan). I don’t remember the last race I was at that had vegan snacks at the end other than fruit and on a cold day like that, chili always tastes good.

So the first race of the year is done. It went well and we’re already looking at others. Since then, we registered for the Dirty Dash in August. It’s a 10k mud run and obstacle course. We also talked about running the Napa Valley Ragnar this year as a team of 12. And maybe even the Rock’n’Roll Marathon in Savannah, GA. We’ll see what the rest of the year brings but hopefully there will be more races like the second one to help keep my first “almost Resolution”.