Tomato 5k

Well, race day finally came on Saturday. Eight weeks of training culminating in a big, nasty 5k race…

I woke up at 5:15 on Saturday morning, took a shower and hopped in my car to get Kim and her husband Paul (who would be walking the race) and ride over to Race City USA (not the official name).

The morning started out well…I found a parking spot on the street about 100 yards from the start/finish line…and we moseyed over to take a picture with our training class at 7am and then ran about a 5 minute warmup as a prelude to the race. I’ve always seen runners warming up before races and thought they were insane…but now I kind of get the whole “get your body moving” idea…we were getting our bodies moving.

At 7:30, the race started…I made sure to move to the back of the pack. I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way when I started and I definitely didn’t want to come out of the gate too quickly. The first quarter mile or so of the race was uphill…and then it was downhill or flat until the 1 mile marker. I ran the whole way to this point.

We hit a giant hill on Fatherland Street (which I knew about and thought I was prepared for), I slowed down gradually until I realized that I’d have to walk to get everything back under control…so I took 100 running steps and then walked 50. I realized I wasn’t ready yet, so I walked to a stop sign and then ran to the next stop sign, repeating until I was over the hill. I then ran the downhill and flat portion of the hill until we came to another uphill, which I again walked.

I was getting hot, I was feeling a little dehydrated (all of the water at the water station came right back up), but I could feel I was kind of getting it done. The course was hilly the rest of the way, I walked the uphills and ran the downhills with no clue what my time was. The key is that I had been running for the majority of the race.

Finally, as I rounded the corner to approach the finish line…I noticed the clock said 49:01…I didn’t know how long it would take me to get there, but I tucked into an all-out sprint…and made it in an official time of 47:57 (I crossed the start line about a minute and a half after the race started). That’s a 15:28 pace for those keeping track at home. Not awful…although I did finish dead last in my age group.

My next goal is two-fold. First, I don’t want to be last in my age group again. Second, I want to break 45 minutes. The plan begins tonight – I have another race coming on Labor Day…my only problem is that I don’t quite know what my plan consists of yet.