I had thought about doing this race when I saw the flyer a few weeks ago at the Armadillo race 10K. A couple of days ago I decided not to do it. Then I had a voicemail from Randall who said he was doing it and wanted to know if I was doing it. I looked at the weather and saw that the conditions would be good, and they were. The course would be a straight, out and back, and flat on the Pinellas trail. It's not that often that everything lines up that way.
It was a small race (I seem to be good at finding these small inaguaral 5K's), so the only drawback is there might not be anyone to race against. Just before the race started I saw two high school kids that I think I had seen at other races. The race started and we all took off, the high schooler in the yellow shirt was out and front. My Garmin briefly said I was doing a 4:51 pace (which I new was wrong), it settled on a 5:5x pace which was not the pace I wanted. I was not going to make the same mistake that I did at the Bolt run back in February so I eased back a little bit. I was back between 100 and 200 feet from the yellow shirt guy and now I was at the pace I wanted.
We hit the turn around, I was still feeling pretty good, the gap had closed slightly. Then at around 2 miles I was gaining on the yellow shirt guy. He was fading a bit because my pace was staying pretty consistent. Then I was past him. Still one mile to go and I had to keep holding my pace. As a warm up I had run the whole route which was good as I knew each little landmark. At about 0.2 into the third mile my garmin played a mean trick on me that it does sometimes. It said I was doing a 6:46 pace and it didn't look like it was going to budge. I didn't feel like I had slowed down but maybe I had. I gave it a little more effort and then it finally clicked back to 6:19 at about 0.5 miles into the third mile.
When I could see the time clock it had 19:3x on it so I knew I could do it. I gave it all I had and past the clock at 19:46. I grabbed my race card and hit the stop button on the Garmin at 19:49.
Splits were: 6:21, 6:22, 6:19, 0.13@5:56 ** Update ** I just found out the actual official time was 19:46 instead of 19:47, yay!
This was the most consistently paced 5K I have run. The conditions were perfect with the main challenge being the last mile when I wasn't chasing anyone down. I also broke with 5K tradition and did not squeeze down a PowerBar gel with caffeine immediately before the race because I was all out. I'm glad that I ran an even race because I did not want to blow my chance at breaking 20 minutes. I was afraid that I'd keep missing it. So, maybe next race I'll try to go out a little bit faster. With the ideal conditions maybe I could have gone a little bit faster but probably not much faster as sometime during the third mile I was feeling like I was one step away from feeling like I was going to throw up.
Randall crossed third after the yellow shirt high school guy.
We stuck around for the awards then Randall and I did just under 3 miles for a cool down. I had my picture taken, received a dog tag for the age group award and a nice plaque for overall male. | 