I’m headed out the door for Thanksgiving dinner, but I wanted to write and say that the race this morning went really well! At 7am my partner and I got in the car and headed up (yes, he sacrificed his sleeping in today to be my race support– so nice) and I picked up my swag bag (a scarf! neat!) and off I went. It was really crowded– it took me a full 2 minutes to actually get across the timing mat (this was actually my first chip-timed race!) We all just sort of shuffled forward slowly until it finally broke up.
I don’t actually remember much of the race itself, which is kind of weird. I do remember that it felt like the entire course was lightly uphill (it was a loop, so that was impossible) and I was in a scrum of run-walkers and families with children 5 abreast. So much dodging other people! I was running along at a steady pace, and I kept passing people who would then stop, walk, and then after a while run and pass me again. Argh! I swear I passed this one lady like 10 times.
But I finished solid in 35:45– an 11:30 pace. Where’d that come from? I just kept running, telling myself “this will only suck for X more minutes”, and “it’s a race, it’s supposed to be hard”. But I was happy to PR! It’s about 45 seconds better than my previous best 5k time.
Now what? I’m not burned out on running– a first after a race, I guess 1-month training plans are good– so maybe I should try to keep my mileage up.
Running While Fat 
Well done – good time for your first race! Sounds to me like you trained for a longer distance – weren’t you doing 7 mile training runs? Or did I read that wrong? 7 miles is over 10k! The stoppers and the ones who want to run 4 abreast are always a pain in races. You can enjoy your dinner now!
Thanks! This wasn’t my first race, only the first chip-timed one… the others have been much smaller– ~50 people– and this one had over 3000! I used second 4 weeks of the Higdon intermediate 5k training, which calls for long runs once a week. Someday I’d like to start doing the 10k distance more seriously.
If you can run 7 miles you could do a 10k tomorrow! No problem to you! I am just sitting here thinking of doing a half-marathon next year – think I am ready to give it a go at this stage.
Congratulations!
Thanks!
Hey, great news on the PR! Glad it went so well.
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