Turkey Trot STL and Thanksgiving

Happy December friends! I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a great weekend after.

Let me start this post with the Turkey Trot. This was the first Turkey Trot that my wife and I have done. She says that it was my idea to do the race, but I remember it being her idea. Either way we did it. We got up for the race around 6:30am and made it there with about 30 min before the race started. We are both not morning people AT ALL, so getting up that early was not fun. But we got there before the race started which is what I really wanted for us to do.

We stayed in the car for about 15 min after we got there because it was SO cold! We were dressed appropriately for the weather, maybe a little over dressed, but it was still cold. The thermometer read 30 degrees F when we got there. COLD!

About 15-20 min before the start of the race we got out of the car and headed to the starting line. I thought I was cold sitting in the car, I was really cold once we got out of the car. The race was held at the St. Charles Family Arena. The starting line was located behind the arena where the parking entrance was. We made our way to the starting area, where we waited for the race to start...in the cold. I tried to position us in between the other racers and the cold breeze. It worked some, not as much as I would have liked.

We migrated to the starting area with the other racers trying to keep warm while waiting for the start. Before we knew it (read: what felt like an eternity in the cold) the race was started and we were off.

This was great, alot of people had turkey hats on!

The course was flat and I'm sure fast as we saw the lead guy reach the 1.5 mile point when we were barely underway. My wife and I were walking and thus not very fast. Once exiting the parking area the course made a loop around the river road and back to the starting area. Pretty straight forward.

Overall the race was good. It was fun to get out the morning of Thanksgiving instead of sleeping all day and then being lazy and eating. I found that it kept me from overeating all day too. I don’t believe that I gained any weight during the holiday.

After the race, I watched some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and made sure the Turkey Trot imported to my training trackers correctly. For the race I used Wahoo Fitness’s iPhone app. The app is nice because after you finish with the race you are able to export it to any of your favorite tracking sites: Nike Plus, Map My Fitness, Garmin Connect, etc. to name a few. It was my first time using the app and it is very customizable and while that is very good, for the first time user that can be very frustrating. The app was tracking my pace based on GPS and I had enabled auto pause. I noticed that during the race it kept pausing randomly. I found out that I had set a 24 min/mile threshold for pace. Since GPS pace is variable based on reception of GPS, the app kept pausing the workout intermittently. It turned a 3.1 mile workout into a 3 mile workout and thus not giving me credit for the full run.

So while I was watching the Parade, I was editing my data and making sure that it was recorded properly. I have all my run data on Nike Plus (it was the first tracker that I knew about and has all my run/walk data on it from the time I first started using it, around 2008). I have all my workouts on MapMyFitness (I like using MapMyFitness for everything because its very versatile and you can record all different kinds of workouts on MMF). I started using Garmin Connect because you can export the GPS data to Nike Plus if you use something else and I wanted to get a feel for it because I asked for a Garmin FR 15 for Christmas. I went through all those sites to make certain that the data matched. Importing data to different sites can have different interpretations of the same data and sometimes the data will come out skewed.

Nike Plus Data

Garmin Connect Data

Map My Fitness Data

The rest of the day went like many other Thanksgiving Day’s. I helped my wife get ready for the evening meal at my parent’s house. She made homemade stuffing and apple crisp. YUM!!! We were so busy that I forgot to get pics of it. I will say that the meal at my parent’s was very good. The homemade stuffing and apple crisp was probably the best part. It was good to see family and get a workout in.

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and didn’t eat too much. Thanks for reading!