Tino Turkey Trot: first fast trot of the week

Thanksgiving already, unusually early because we have five Thursdays this month and the 4th one falls on the 22nd (can't get earlier than that). At 11:30 this morning, Agnès called from school to alert me about this fun event taking place in the afternoon, after school. I had run it 3 years ago when Max was a Senior, 2 days before running the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot one and 4 days before Quad Dipsea...

I had actually planned on tapering today to get my legs a short 2-day break before the upcoming Silicon Valley Turkey Trot on Thursday morning and to continue recovering from last Saturday's JFK 50-mile and my fast 100-mile the week before, not to mention last week's cold... Yet, and since I'm trying to take the week off, I couldn't resist the challenge of some speed work along with a a few fast and young XC runners! I jogged the mile between my house and the Cupertino High School track and barely made it before the start, therefore missing the "race" briefing and course instructions.

Not knowing where we were heading to, I followed the top 2 runners (students) and we started in the red zone, around 5:20 min/mile pace. I passed them in the second/smaller loop, which I thought was the last loop, but we went for another one of these small loops. As you can see on the map the course was quite convoluted, in the good Turkey Trot tradition (turkeys don't run straight... ;-). At the finish, my Garmin GPS indicated 1.88 miles (3.0 km) in 10:28 (5:35 min/mile). Here with Dusty:

And with Justin (red top, 2nd overall) and Willy (blue, 3rd), two fast runners of Tino's XC and T&F teams:

Thank you to Mr Morse and the ASB leaders for organizing this fun event and gathering numerous volunteers to show us the way throughout the school campus! To Coach Armstrong for lending us such rabbits ;-). And to Mr Lawson for helping perpetuating this nice tradition!

See some of you among a much larger flock (more than 20,000 participants!) in 2 days in San Jose for the 8th Silicon Valley Turkey Trot! IBM is one of the sponsors and I should be giving a few words on main stage before jumping to the starting line! ;-)