I had fun at this race and felt a little bit of redemption after my slower than hoped for time last week at Utah Valley. I had asked the boys to run with me but Andy was volunteering at the hospital and Thomas had met and exceeded his mileage goal for the week before (and wasn't very eager to go), so I figured I would enjoy the race myself. Instead of t-shirts they had these really nice beach towel sized towels with the race name printed on them. I had to wait until after the race to get mine because I was doing race day registration.
This race takes place in John Chestnut park which is very shaded. I've done a number of 5k's here and I think they pretty much use the same route each time (one small loop about a half mile, and then a bigger loop for the rest).
Splits: 6:18, 6:28, 6:42, 0.04@5:42
Now, I know those don't really look like splits or distance that work out to a 19:42 5k, and at first I did think that the course was short. But after talking to other people the consensus is the course really is 5k but the heavy shade can mess up the gps signal. People using their iphones for watches measured 3.2 miles, and gps people came up a little bit short but the RD said the course was accurate. Also, while I was running, I'd notice my lap pace for the second mile would fluctuate wildly.
I'll just have to run another 5k soon to see if I can repeat or beat this time. It's a good bit faster than my last 5k and a few seconds faster than the one before that which was run on a cooler day and was the one where I was trying to win a large jar of raw local honey (which I did).
Sasha's advice to me last week was to concentrate on 5k's for a while. So, that was another reason to want to race this one. While I was running the race it occurred to me maybe he meant more concentrating on training for a 5k, but maybe also did mean to run more. 5k is a short enough distance where running enough of them is pretty good training.
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