St. Paddy's Day 5K Race Report
Well, I finished! As I posted a week or two ago, I failed at my only other attempte at a 5K:
link. So, I’m glad I gutted this one out.
The weather for the race wasn’t bad. Low 30s. 10 mph or so wind but it was diagonal. Parked at my parents’ house which was 2.6 miles away from the start so I could leave my keys and stuff somewhere while having a nice distance for a warm up and cool down later.
I got there 20 minutes early and staked out my starting spot near the front but not too near. 2,200 runners so this was a decent size 5K. I didn’t really have a goal but I’d be ecstatic to break 19:00 and happy to be at 19:15 or so.
The course is basically an out-and-back the first 2 miles then winds around downtown for the last part. Mile 1 was against the diagonal wind and although this was a fairly flat course, there was some elevation gain making it the hardest of the 3 miles. I started strong at a little under 6:00 pace but quickly sensed that was going to be a bit too fast and slowed. Finished mile 1 in 6:14, HR avg. 153.
As I mentioned mile 2 was back the same way so it was mainly on a downgrade and partially with the wind. That didn’t help my time though as I was having a tough time and wanted to make sure I didn’t run out of gas completely. 6:20/168.
I kept the same pace mile 3 and was hanging in there. 6:19/168. I picked it up for the last .1 at 5:55 pace.
My Garmin was a few seconds off from my official time which was 19:34. I finished 33 out of 2204 and 2 out of 110 in my age group. I didn’t think about awards and left shortly after the race but I now notice that the top 3 in each AG get a medal. I can pick mine up at a local running store so I suppose I should probably do that. However, wasn’t this a really slow crowd? I wouldn’t have expected to finish so high with the time I got.
Although part of me is disappointed with my time, it’s nice to have a 5K time in the books. I’ve decided that 2013 is going to be my Summer of Speed and I’m going to shift my training after Boston from distance stuff to shorter stuff like 5Ks. This gives me something to measure my (hopefully) improvement on.