Goal Accomplished – Run a 5K!

I’ve never particularly liked running for it’s own sake. I love playing sports so running for soccer or basketball is fine.. but running mile after mile is just monotonous to me. That being said I’ve always wanted to run in a race – if only for the challenge but I have absolutely no desire to run a marathon – so a 5K is more my speed (which, honestly, is slow)

I started by looking at various 5K events happening in my general area and decided to do one on my town which was a charity event for Samantha Josephson’s ‘What’s my name’ 5K – promoting ride sharing safety after the tragic death of Samantha as a college student. Please check out their site and consider donating [https://www.whatsmyname.org/foundation]

Since I had three months I decided to do a trial 5K to see how my time was and it wasn’t pretty – I was clocked in an uber slow 17 minute mile pace. That’s barely faster than someone walking so I knew I needed to speed that up. My goal was to get in under 40 minutes so I mixed in running with HIIT exercises in the gym and managed to get my practice runs down to around a 15 minute mile when i got the COVID which threw everything out the window. I was sick for two weeks and then dealt with exhaustion for two weeks after that – leaving me only two weeks to try to shave more time off that 15 minutes after being down and out for almost a month.

I knew if I tried to over train I would end up hurting myself or burning through my energy so I went hard for one week and tapered it back the next taking the mileage from 3 down to 1 as a warmup for the race. The night before the race I ate a giant bowl of pasta (Italian creatine baby!) and for breakfast a bagel sandwich for a nice carb/protein mix.

I had a lot of energy and was amped up by the crowd and all the other runners and when we all took off I was matching the pace in the middle of the pack which my Apple watch was telling me was a nice crisp 12 minute mile. I kept that pace for over 1.5 miles which was quite a surprise to me as that’s the fastest pace I managed since I was in my 20’s. However.. the back half I started to run out of energy and the pace dropped to around 14 minutes a mile (I think it was psychological as I hit the 1 mile mark the lead runners were already on the back end of the race)

In the last stretch I was greeted by my wife and kids with home made signs cheering me on and I found a well of energy to kick up my pace from plodding run to sort of speedy. I crossed the finish line just under 40 minutes (by just I mean maybe 3 seconds) and collapsed onto the grass gasping for breath.

I’m glad I did this – I’ve had ‘run a 5K’ on my goal list for almost 10 years now and it’s always one of the goals I don’t complete.. so getting this accomplished even with how out of shape I am was a big achievement for me and seeing my kids yelling support for me was an amazing moment I’ll treasure for a long time.