The strange case of the flying shoe: my 'welcome back' 5k

I had a weird moment at the start of the Sharin' O' the Green 5k. I lined up in the front row, the gun went off -- and a yellow shoe came bouncing through the ranks. Now, blame the fact that I'd "just" got off the plane back from England or whatever, but for some strange reason I thought it was mine...
....the shock stopped me in my tracks. "What the....?" I shouted, as I immediately lost 20 places in the stampede for the first corner. Of course it wasn't my shoe -- I mean I pride myself on my body awareness and I KNEW I wasn't stumping along on one sock. But subliminally my brain had registered it was a bright yellow Nike Mayfly -- the same shoes I had on.
I only found out via email well after the race that the shoe belonged to my pal Dwight; he's the guy who told me about them in the first place; he lost 1:21 rescuing the shoe and getting it back on.
Meanwhile, back in the race, the burst of adrenalin caused by this bit of minor excitement completely screwed up my cunning race plan designed with Ric to help me make the most of my return to US soil after two weeks in the UK.
I had planned on pre-registering my excuses in my blog the night before, but YourRunning was having a temporary glitch so I realise that these are now unofficial excuses. But anyway... I'd managed only three runs while in the UK, I'd got a nasty attack of the squits ("traveler's tummy" as it is more quaintly named) and, after a largely sleepless night, woken up on the day of travel to find my back had seized up in sympathy. I flew courtesy of the pharmaceutical butt plug known as Immodium. And by the time I got home to Boulder I was not in the best of shape. So no "runs" until warming up for the race.
So the strategy called for a controlled start, with the first mile in 6:15 or thereabouts and then a steady acceleration while picking off runners on the way to the line. Ha! First mile: 5:40. Second mile 6:30 while gasping for recovery in the thin air. Third mile: 6:04 and a storming fast, fast finish. Good enough for 19:20. Embarrassed as usual by 57-year-old Doug Bell (2 years older than me) who won the whole 50-59 age group in 17:00. Amazing! I have promised myself that I will somehow claw myself up to him by the end of the year. Now please forget I said that.
More important than the time -- as this was the whole point of turning out -- was that as far as I know I successfully defended my lead in the Colorado Runner race series. This may not be good news, though, because the longer this charade goes on, the more I get drawn in to running races that I would not normally consider -- like the Greenland trail 8-miler (5 miles uphill), which is up next; and the Colorado half-marathon down the Poudre river valley which follows soon.
Ah well. As to times, well the UK trip has kyboshed my ludicrous aim of taking a minute a month off my 5k time until a) I self-destruct or b) I wake up and realize I've been dreaming. But -- and it's a nice, substantial but -- I am still improving from race to race, by roughly 30 seconds: 20:05 (Jan), 19:41 (Feb) and now 19:20.
Two other things I'm celebrating are that after the UK trip (see excuses above), I really thought I had lost ground; well, I have, but not as much as I thought; secondly, doing my normal geeky comparisons, I can't help but notice that the great Doug Bell ran 17:10 in January and 17:00 this weekend; so he's taken 10 seconds off; I've taken off 45. On such trifles are built the cathedral-like vaulted ceilings of my sad ambitions :)
And talking of geeks...those of you who are not, like me, numerically challenged, will have immediately noticed something odd about my splits. Did I really take another 62 seconds to run the extra 0.1 of a mile, or 161 metres? Well no, I don't think so; according to my GPS and feedback from a couple of other runners, the course was another 0.1 long. Just enough, methinks, for me to claim I was under 19 at the true 5k mark.
Full results are up here.