RR: Yankee Candle 5K

Short: 33:47 (10:54 pace) 75/107 OA 35/59 OA women 11/18 AG (F3039) Haiku I hate the 5K Running fast is not my thing But yay! a PR Long: Another spontaneous Cohen race… as Adam said, we saw VTgirl’s plans for Saturday and realized we’d be right there, so we figured we might as well just run the 5K. I haven’t actually run a 5K since last September, so I was hoping for a PR (old PR was 35:04). I’m still working with mostly dead legs these days, so I wasn’t expecting miracles. CS did his usual time prediction for me - 29:30. (Let’s all stop for a second and laugh. OK, let’s move on.) Adam’s prediction was 31:00 (OK, more laughing here). I was hoping for anything under 34, which was still going to be a substantial PR. Slept like poo on Friday night. Had a lovely pre-race breakfast of spaghetti with turkey sausage and goat cheese on the way out to western MA as part of my continuing quest to find something to eat before races that a) fits with all of my weird diet things b) I can eat in the car, and c) I actually like and can stomach in the AM. We got out to Deerfield and ran a little 15 minute warmup, first 10 minutes easy, then a couple pickups for the last 5 I spent most of the warmup thinking it was unlikely I could actually manage to run 3.1 miles at all, let alone 3.1 fast miles. CS tells me that’s the point of the warmup, to get all that out of your system. Ran into VTgirl and her family before the start, waited for Santa to hit the gong, and then we were off. The field immediately split – fasties off the front, the rest of us off the back. As the first group stretched out, I actually managed to catch it from the front of the second group. I was planning on just running the entire race by feel, no looking at the garmin at all. I kept myself at that “uncomfortable” level of effort as long as I could (which actually stretched way farther than normal) My big plan for a faster 5K was to actually run slower when I felt like dying, rather than stopping to walk. I managed to avoid looking at my Garmin when it beeped to auto lap, and then I went a great deal farther than expected before it beeped at the 15 minute mark (it’s set up to remind me to eat on long runs, and I was too lazy to change it). I think I ended up running the first mile in 10:10 or something. The second mile sucked a great deal more than the first mile… there were a few slower running breaks here, but I just kept moving and reminded myself I didn’t have that far to run. I missed the 2 mile beep, probably because I was panting like a woman in labor. I was starting to really focus on running towards the next bit of shade, although Adam insists it was not that hot. I was MELTING. I was carrying my hand bottle, more to shoot myself with water than to actually drink anything. I hit a big fat mental wall at the 2.44 mark… we had just crossed the intersection back towards where the race started, and I thought I was close to done, but we took a little loop away for a while… my brain just said hell NO, so I peeked at my Garmin and looked at just the distance, then reminded myself that I had the capacity to suffer for far longer than 6/10ths of a mile, so I sucked it up and kept moving. More little slowdown breaks, but I kept picking it back up as soon as I could. I think I ran mile 2 in 11:00, and mile 3 in 11:30. Pacing short stuff is not my strong point. When I started getting close to the end, I tried to kick it as much as I had… I apparently ran a 9:00 pace for the last 10th of a mile. I came around the corner and saw 33<img alt="" class="inlineimg" src="http://www.kickrunners.com/forum/images/smilies/mad.gif" style="border:0px solid;" title="Mad">x on the clock, and just pushed as hard as I could to the end. Then we had a fun lunch with VTgirl and her husband, then sweated my butt off zip lining. All in all, a fun Saturday. I was all second guessing myself afterwards (as usual), but then I looked at my HR data. My LT is right around 173… my average HR for the second two miles was 170. I averaged 180 for the last tenth of a mile, so I’m thinking that was about all I had yesterday. I was hoping for faster but my running has sucked this summer. I did manage a 10:58 pace for the 4 mile run segment of my last sprint… but it was cool and rainy that day.

RR: Yankee Candle 5K

Stitcher

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