5K

As I mentioned, last Saturday morning I ran in a 5K race with Stephanie. It was the first timed run I had done since Jr High gym and High School track.

On our way to the race we stopped in at Safeway to pickup some nourishment for energy. I had a Clif bar and Steph had a Luna bar (basically a Clif bar for women) and we shared a Gatorade. Now two of those things were on sale so it was going to be a good deal, BUT since I didn't bring my wallet along to the race I didn't have my stupid Safeway card with me (oh, how I miss Cub and its consistantly low prices without a stupid club card). They make a provision for this and allow you to input your phone number in a keypad instead of swiping your card. Well, this didn't work because my Safeway card still had my old phone number associated with it, along with Steph's, and along with everyone else in my house because that number didn't work. So instead of swiping some random card (like I've seen happen on multiple occasions) the stupid checkout lady told me to hold on to the receipt and bring it in later with my card for a refund. Well, I was not too happy with that response but there was nothing I could do. (On a positive note, since we didn't have any pockets we put the change in the change slot of a pay phone and when we came back later our $.50 was still there!)

So we started towards the starting line chowing our energy bars and sipping the Gatorade. When we got there I started looking around for a garbage can and couldn't find one anywhere. I finally spotted one that was half a block away from the line and ran over to pitch our trash. Of course, as I'm coming around the corner back onto the street I hear the starting gun go off. Nice, my first race and I miss the gun!

No worries, there were hundreds of people in front of us anyway so we couldn't have gone anywhere anyway. As we crossed the starting line I started my own stop watch to see what our "real" time would be. We started off running with the pack and then trying to pick our way through to get ahead of most of the slower people. (of course, we were some of the slower people) I started off feeling very good and set the pace a little high, Steph was struggling a little to keep up but was doing fine. At about the mile or mile-and-a-half mark I was really starting to feel the lack of training creeping through my body. Keep in mind that I had been out on short bike rides and a couple of walks in recent weeks--and I also play basketball on most Friday mornings before work, but I hadn't been running in a while, maybe a month or two.

Near this halfway point, as I was told later, Steph started feeling a lot better and I was letting her set the pace. It was a struggle to keep up but I managed. For the last 2K or so it was mostly downhill, which felt a lot better than the gradual uphill climb we had been on for most of the morning, but I was getting so burned out it didn't matter much.

There were lots of people out on the course to watch friends and just runners in general. It was nice to have people cheering you on the whole way. At one spot this lady had brought her garbage can and a big bucket out and was playing the drums on them. The cadence didn't help with the rhythm of running, but it was fun to listen to (though I didn't think about her neighbors who might have wanted to be sleeping at 7:45am on a Saturday morning).

On the home strech we picked up the pace maybe a step and passed a few stragglers making their way to the finish--there were also many 10Kers finishing at that time, they had started 15 minutes before the 5K run.

Our official time was 29:36 which is a 9:33 mile pace. Stephanie placed in the upper half of all women in the race and I placed much closer to the bottom of all men. Our real time (by my watch) was 29:14 which is a 9:24 mile pace, not much difference, but hey, in racing every second counts. We were happy with our times, considering the shape we are in and the training regimen we had leading to the race.

So will I do one again? I'm pretty sure I will. But I definitely would like to get out there and run a little bit before doing another race. I know it would help me for the upcoming hockey season.