Quick race write-up before I start working...
My disdain for short distances is well-documented, and there's no way in hell I'd do this on my own, so I guess I owe you guys a "thank you" for getting my ### out there and doing this.
I treated this like any other race. No running on Tuesday, pasta on Tuesday night, an easy 4-mile shakeout with some strides on Wednesday, and a simple dinner of salmon and rice on Wednesday night. As I wrote to the guys in our team e-mail thread, I was nervous yesterday morning, literally the same way I'd feel nervous for a PR marathon attempt. Got up, did a quick 20-minute low impact (neurostim) ride on the Peloton to wake up my legs, ate my normal breakfast, then spent the morning working.
Fueled up with a PB&J around 10am, had a package of those belVita breakfast biscuits and a flat Coke around 1pm, then hopped in my car to drive to my race route on a paved bike path about 15 minutes from my house. Admittedly, my route was pretty much perfect - point-to-point, gradually descending about 160 feet from start to finish with the wind at my back the whole way. My only concern was two road crossings where the trees make it virtually impossible to check for traffic until you're pretty much there; if I ended up having to stop or even slow down for traffic, it would definitely cost me some time. Anyway, I parked my car at the second crossing and jogged 2.5 miles up towards the start as a warmup. After about 6 minutes, Garmin gave me a "performance condition" score of -2. Probably just the nerves causing an elevated HR, but still...#### you, Garmin. Walked the rest of the way to the start, did a couple of strides, ditched the long-sleeve shirt, switched over to my 5K playlist, and hit the start button. We’re off!
Nothing too memorable about the run itself. My prior PR was 18:36 from many years ago, so my initial goal was just to do better, but I literally hadn’t run anything fast outside since my Turkey Trot back in November, and I’ve NEVER tried to time trial a 5K by myself, so I really had no idea what to expect. When the first mile popped off at 5:48 (with a Garmin score of +0), my goal switched to keeping them all sub-6. As one would expect, it got progressively more painful along the way, but thankfully the real agony held off until the last mile. Also, road crossings were a non-issue. Focused on
@pbm107's advice about the second mile being key and used my teammates as motivation the whole way in running these splits:
Mile 1 – 5:48/159 AHR (165 max)
Mile 2 – 5:52/167 AHR (169)
Mile 3 – 5:55/170 AHR (174)
Mile 0.1 – 5:44/174 AHR (176)
Overall time was 18:10, average 5:51/mile, PR by almost 30 seconds at 43 years young. Not bad for an endurance monster.
The only thing that pisses me off, and I
really wish that I wasn’t so obsessive, is that I didn’t run the extra hundredth of a mile and stop at 3.11 so that I’d “officially” cover the full 3.10686 miles and Strava would acknowledge the 5K PR. I didn’t stop the watch
immediately (waited a second or two) when it said 3.10, so even if the Garmin was perfectly accurate (unlikely), I ran something more than 3.10000 but less than 3.10686. At 5:44 average pace, the extra couple thousandths would’ve added
maybe 1-2 seconds to my overall time, so it’s a big PR regardless. Again, I really shouldn’t let that bother me, but I can’t help it. The obsessiveness is a blessing and a curse, I guess.
Anyway, great things so far for
#TeamGrue. Keep up the good work, gents!