Another great, and wet, run! Non stop rain did not stop the enthusiasm for the thousands of runners the met this year for the 5k and 15k Miracle Miles Event in Orlando.

Highlights for me:

First race-in-the-rain!

Second race without wearing headphones (in fanny pack as security blanket). First one was Disney, by choice; more later.

Longest race without any walking.

(Sub 🙂 ) 9 min/mi.

Lots of fun.

I even knew a bunch of runners at event; neat. Lastly, I feel happy about performance. First 15k, hence reference for distance, and time-to-beat for next 15k’s , hopeful, PR!

Building on my previous race analysis for the Oviedo 5K, I debated whether to use Tableau (rocks!) again or try Oracle’s Cloud Analytics.

Disclaimer – Happy Oracle Employee.

Even thou it has a 30 day trial, I think free developer accounts will be more suitable to accelerate adoption. I’ve inquired and await response but they know best I guess. Oracle does offer such a service for APEX; maybe its a matter of time…

Maybe next time; Tableau to the rescue it is.

Similarly to the Oviedo 5k, this was a mostly regional race. Here we see where runners came from.

But this race was quite a bit bigger than Oviedo’s. Here we see the distribution of runners per age group per gender.

My friend Raul, who is training for NYM, is consistently making good times. As seen here, his effort was good for 12th place in our age group.

I still have a bit more to go. For me to show up in results, I have to dig into my age instead.

Prior to race, we had decided to go for a warm-up run around the block and gauge how difficult running in the rain was going to be. As the 5K group took off one way, we decided to take off the opposite way for a cool mile or so… assuming rain would delay things a bit.

This proved to be the wrong assumption, Track Shack is amazing at organizing events. Needless to say, the 15K started on time and EXACTLY as we got back from warm up run. Between the rain and setting up my watch, I had no time to setup music/headphones, etc. A seldom mentioned ‘feature’ of the Forerunner 10 is that one needs to stand still for GPS acquisition.

Perfect storm. We get back from warm up run, Raul wants to go up front for race start… I HAVE to stand still for GPS signal; no music!

Matter of fact, I had to stand still for so long (can I blame the clouds?) that I got to watch just about everyone else take off before I got a GPS signal.

My race stared like this. Right to left, these are the waves of people as they cross the starting lines over time.

This was a blessing in disguise. As mentioned, not resorting to music allowed me to enjoy friendly crowd and I even got to pass a few runners because of this! Numbers show me here in select group; I passed 1157 runners. Only 6 other runners passed more people than me.

Ok, that is a lot of people. No complaints. Many fast runners up front had to deal with crowds as well.

Here’s how they had to fare ahead of pack before the crowds thin out. For the first 30 seconds, the starting line looked like this. Notice the different paces.

Lastly, this is how race looked from my point of view.

That’s about it for me. All the numbers in this post are brought to you by Google Refine, LibreOffice and Tableau Public. Chart ought to link to Tableau Workbook.

I’ll be building on these (and joining races!); stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.