Photos are here:    https://photos.app.goo.gl/ua9vUqdLZfZQ6RWd9

Before The Start:   Held on August 19^th, 2023, the Little Comets 5K was held in Castroville, Texas with a start time of 8:15 a.m.  This event helped raise funds for a field trip for the students of St. Louis Catholic School.  The 5K was timed, but no medals or age group awards, and registrants got a pretty nice quality event shirt. There were very few other local area events on this day, resulting in a nice turn-out of around 200 participants. I arrived about an hour before start time, got my shirt, and then got a few pre-start photos.  

 On the Course:  This was a loop course that started and finished at Houston Square, an area across from the school that had a large parking lot, a small park with a water fountain, a church across the street, a nearby thrift shop and other various nearby businesses, and some historical markers, as Castroville is a pretty historic place in Texas history.  Before the main event there was a Kid’s Run.  A local priest – I think he was a priest – of the nearby St. Louis Church gave us a prayer blessing.  I chatted with him a bit and found out he was originally from the Philippines, so we had a nice pre-race chat, as I had lived in the Philippines for almost 7 years during my Air Force career. After the prayer blessing, we were on our way. The course was just about all flat, with a couple of climbing inclines along the way, but nothing you could really call a hill. Temp was around 81 degrees and pretty humid but thankfully this course looped around a really nice residential area that had several shade trees on several of the streets we went on. I did my usual 8-minute-run/2-minute-walk intervals and took some on-course photos during my walk breaks. This really is a kid-friendly event, so there were several kids on the course, some running, some walking, some riding bikes or those non-motorized scooters, and so forth.  Some of the kids that were running were also pretty darn speedy too, leaving me eating their dust, lol.  I felt pretty good and was doing pretty well until I got to this one street we went down that had a dog or two in just about every yard along the way.  I ended up really killing my expected finish time by stopping quite a bit along this street to hand out treats to our doggie audience members.  On the next-to-the last street we were on, we passed by a food place which I assumed was quite popular locally, as the whole front eating areas was packed with customers…and, of course, a couple of dogs, so another stop, lol.  One guy saw my cancer survivor shirt and told me “Me too”, so  we had a short chat, adding more time to my finish time, lol. Very nice guy, though; enjoyed the chat. After that, I finally went non-stop to the finish, ending up with positive splits – Mile 1, 13-something, Mile 2, 14-something, Mile 3, 15-something – 13,14, 15! Lol.  My finish time was 44:37, averaging 14:24 per mile.     

After My Finish:  First thing, back to the car, to get some iced down water I had brought.  Sat in the car with my A/C on full blast for a bit and got myself re-hydrated. That felt great.  Then it was back out into the finish area to chat with other participants and get a few after-photos. Several participants had already left since no awards, etc, but a pretty good group was still around, chatting and relaxing post-race. Enjoyed interacting with them.

Epilogue:   This was my first time doing this event. I found it very enjoyable.  The volunteers and organizers are all great people, as are the participants. Very nice quality race shirt.  The school principal also courteously opened the school to us, so we could use indoor restrooms; very nice not to have to get in a porta-potty on a humid day.  The course is a very friendly one – and that includes the occasional drivers that came along, as the roads during this event are open to traffic.  They were very polite and safety-conscious and patient in taking it nice-and-easy as they passed by us very slowly and watching out especially for the kids on the course. The neighborhood we were in is really nice with some beautiful homes along the way and some humongous yards in some of them; must take them hours to get the lawns mowed, lol.  I really liked this event a lot. I most certainly will do it again in the future and would recommend it to others. MUCHO thanks to my running community friend, Allie and husband Jim who, I think, were the Acting Race Directors for this one. Thanks also to all the volunteers who helped make this one happen for we participants, as well as the event sponsors.  Also thanks to the priest from the church for being there to starts us off – I think his name is Rev. Tacay, but I may be mistaken – and also for the nice chat we had about the Philippines, I really enjoyed that.  Thank you all, and to anyone else involved I may not have mentioned here.