Monday, October 22, 2012

What? I actually ran a race?!

Well... four years later, I finally ran a 5k! My wife's birthday is tomorrow (well, in 15 minutes it'll be today) and she said she wanted me to run a 5k with her. So we signed up and I ran it. Well, I use the term "run" loosely. I jogged it. As in, I wasn't walking. There were people who were walking who were ahead of us for much of the race (full disclosure, we got there a couple of minutes late and so we didn't start when everyone else did, so EVERYONE was ahead of us when we started). We ran (jogged) the whole thing. I stopped one time to take off my coat (and my headphones got stuck and twisted all around. But I was pretty happy with this, especially because I barely trained for it. I went out about a month ago and ran/walked a mile, then I went out two weeks ago and ran a mile on an indoor track and then last week I ran on the indoor track again... well, I'm not sure how far. I know I ran a mile, but it was 12 laps to a mile and I lost track... but it was somewhere between a mile and a half and 2 miles. So, ramping it up to 3.1 miles was a bit of a stretch... but I kept a pretty (pedestrian) pace the whole time of about 15 minutes per mile and ended up with a time of 47:13. LINK It's crazy... when I was in high school my fastest mile time was 5:40 and I ran a 5k in 20:41. LINK That seems (and feels) like so long ago... but I'd love to get back into some sort of shape where I can go out and run a little bit and not be absolutely floored when I'm done. Even though I felt pretty good (though tired) on Saturday after the race, it was Sunday that I was really hurting... especially my shins. I guess that's just motivation to work harder in training so the actual races don't hurt as much!