RTW 5K

Sorry to disappoint but this is nowhere near as exciting a report as Bill's sub-7:00 time trial, or Keith's delivery on his guaranteed PR, in August even. No, for the most part, this was just a training run for me.

As I stated in an earlier post, my intention for this race was to treat it as a training run. Furthermore, I intended to run the course twice plus one mile to complete my scheduled 7 mile long run per theFit schedule. Well, I ended up taking it a little more seriously than a training run and it was sure too hot to do the course twice.

So, there's really nothing exciting about the race to report. I ran a respectable (for me) 45:22. That's an average pace of 14:36. I stayed pretty even on the effort. Never really pushed it too hard. It felt like a little bit easer than my tempo effort and a little bit harder than easy effort. Pretty much just a good hard 3.1.

It was so awesome to finally meet Barbara. Also, the wives made a killer showing with Donna, Gerlinde, and Fran running great races. Good to see my old pal, Cassie and her fiance, Manny. Sarah drove up from Clear Lake and really ran well. Of course Keith delivered on his PR promise. Jon was Mr. Jonny on the spot, organizing, announcing, passing out ice cream, timing the race, and all the things Jon does. Waverly was just in my sights the whole race but decided to start running the last mile and I never saw her again. LOL!!! Finally met Coach Bill and that was a treat. I'd really like to sit down and talk to him one day. Wish my pals Bill and Christy were there. That would have made the trip complete.

Here's a photo after about .25 miles. Sweating already:

Besides that, one final interesting thing that happened. Being way behind the back of the pack, I always appreciate those who linger around the finish and give a little word of encouragement to the laggers. On Saturday, I was in for a real treat. A kind older gentleman suddenly appeared on the course, well into mile 2 and was telling everybody around (I was the only race participant withing earshot of his voice), "Five more minutes. It's just right up here, just 5 more minutes." Well I guess he realized I was the only one running the 5K so he decided he was going to run me in. Well, I thought, ok. Well, he proceeded to tell me that if I would just do this every week, just get out there an run every week, "that weight would come right off." He offered a lot of other advice like "what you need to do is get you a pair of sweatpants and run with them on. Then I could sweat some of that weight off my lower body." He even suggested I get a heart rate monitor and proceeded to tell me to keep it around 80% maxHR. Oh, he did tell me my maxHR was 180 after asking my age. The best advice he offered was when he said, "now when you get home, you need to do some of these exercises right here," motioning like he was doing a pushup. I thought, well, that would be good. Then he said, "You know, the exercise where you push the food away! You just push it away and you'll lose that weight." Finally toward the end he did say something that made me feel good. I was pretty strong there at the finish, not a sprint, just strong. He was saying, "man, you can run a 5K, a big man like you. You're doing pretty good. Big guy like you able to run a 5K. you're way ahead of a lot of people your size. Good job!!!" All in all, I was not offended by any of his comments. He was a sweet man and was sincerely trying to help me.