Chinese New Year's 5k (Year of the Tiger)

Another has gone by and I’ve run another race at Papago park. I’m pretty sure this was the same crew that put on the other New year’s 5k (as in Jan 1st). If I recall correctly I wasn’t a big fan of the prison anklet timing devices on that day, but they weren’t around today.
I seem to have run two distinct versions of the Papago park race, this company uses the version that has a hill, well really a series of hills for close to the first mile. It’s a slightly tougher version of the course but it does help stretch the field out fairly quickly.
This race doesn’t really have anything to set it aside from any other. It’s a good little race, about 200 or so runners, with a decent field, my age category had all 3 placers finish under nineteen minutes. That’s a bummer for me but I like to see others do well and I don’t feel like I really raced when a twenty two minute run finishes in the top ten. I haven’t checked yet, but I probably wasn’t in the top 25 and I know for sure that I wasn’t in the top 3 in the 35 to 39! That does bring up one criticism I had today. The race started at 9am but the awards didn’t start until about 10:20. I don’t mind waiting around but it would be nice if they could get preliminary results out before the awards so I make an informed decision to stay or not.
I’m not sure if the volume knob was bumped today or I just wasn’t in the mood for the announcer, but at times I was uncomfortable with just how loud it was. Sometimes I’d like to think up a polite way to let people know you EITHER yell or you use a microphone, but you don’t yell into a microphone. I seriously believe the announcer’s voice could have carried without the boost. I know after the New Year’s race I read a review from a runner who wasn’t pleased with the content of the announcer’s talking. I didn’t notice anything that day, but today I could have done without the face Chinese accent…it’s not funny, it’s just racist. He also used the term Boobs….several times despite the fact that race included a kid sprint.
In the end, not a bad race for those of us who like to have something to do every weekend, but again, there was no one thing about the race that made it unique. The T shirt was nice and since I didn’t place I don’t know what the medals looked like, but I’m always happy to see five year age categories. I’m going to grade this race a C+ but I’m sure I’ll be back next year unless something else comes up. There is a race at 6pm today and I would consider doing a different race although I generally don’t like doing races at night.