I had been nervous about today's 5k because I wanted to be faster than I was at my last 5k, but then last night I realized that the course is long (3.24 according to the website) and there are like a thousand people in it. So I decided not to take it too seriously. I still wanted to try, though. So I started in the third row back and ran with my elbows out for the first quarter mile or so, and then I tried to have a pushing-but-not-all-out pace for the first mile. Usually my first miles are the fastest, but the first mile in this race is entirely uphill and I don't like running up hills. That first mile was 7:44.  |
The second mile is completely downhill, so during that mile I tried to visualize falling forward (using the decline, not tripping) and told myself that the hill was helping me rest and got 6:33. During the third mile I thought about this girl that had been ahead of me for awhile. She looked like someone I should be able to beat, and I remembered something I had read on someone's FRB about how if you can see someone near the end of a race you can catch them. The third mile has a bit of uphill to it, so I thought about keeping steady. I got a little closer to the girl, and I decided that I'd try to pass her if I got the chance. (Third mile was 7:33.) At the end we have to run around the BYU track, so as we started on that I totally passed the girl and then just held steady. Then she surged and passed me back a few seconds later. By then we were coming around for the last bit of track, and I thought about passing her again. But you know that thing about how people will suddenly sprint and go way faster at the end of a race than they've been going the whole rest of the time? It's super awkward to me. Of course I think that people should do what they want to do, but if you've got enough energy to all of a sudden go twice as fast at the end as you have been going, wouldn't a person rather go a little faster throughout? Or maybe the excitement of being at the end gives people extra adrenaline. I don't know. Anyway, I didn't want to do that. Also I was kind of self-conscious about the whole trying-to-beat-someone-in-front-of-a-bunch-of-people thing, especially since it's not like we were super fast. So she was a little ahead of me. (Last bit was 7:23 pace.) But guess what? It turns out that if I *had* beat her, I would have gotten 1st (instead of 2nd) in my age group (I think). So now I wish I had tried to beat her. Especially since it would have validated that mile and a half where I was thinking about how I could totally take her.  |
I was a little bummed because my goal had been to be under 23 minutes, and as I was coming around the track I knew I wasn't going to make it. But Eric points out that since the course was long, if we assume that I would have gone the same pace for just .1 that I went for the .22, my time would have been around 22:34. That makes me feel better. Remember how last week I said I had anxiety about going up to 35 miles? I decided to skip that and go straight to 40, so a few hours after the race Eric and I dropped Elliott off at my sister's house and went to the Gold's Gym in Sandy. They didn't have the fancy new treadmills (even though when I called and asked the person who answered said that they did (liar!)), and there were only a few channels on the TV. But it was nice to be running "with" Eric. The first 6 miles were fine, but when I started on the second 6 I was feeling kind of sore. And the last 2 sucked so much. I even went faster so that it would be over sooner. But I'm glad I did it.
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