SHC 5K Race Report: Jack rabbit starts always hurt

This 5K felt like a race, which was weird. How did I know it was a race? I made a morning schedule:

• 6:45 - Wake up, check heart rate and weight, eat, bathroom, warm up ankle, bathroom, grab wine (as you do... see below), water
• 7:10 - Leave home
• 7:30 - Arrive at R's, assemble strata for brunch (hence the wine)
• 8:20 - Head to the race
  
• 8:39 - Warm up
• 8:55 - Water + gel
• 9:00 - Race
  

I usually approach road races as just fun training, but yesterday I was out for a PR. Then again, it's also been 18 months since I've run a 5K (I know, I was surprised by this as well), and I've gotten more competitive in that time.

This being the first race with the new coach there were several new elements to it. Like a warm up. Coach gave me about 2 miles with progressively harder effort to get warm and ready. I've been struggling with the development of a low shin splint (originally occurred just before nationals, but keeps acting up). It hurt on this warm up, but the combination of the adrenaline and the warm up made it pain-free during the actual race.

The race strategy was to not go out too hard and to negative split the race. I got to the start line just as the gun went off. I tried to stay with friend D. But within a few yards, it was clear that keeping up with him was out of the question. I tried to keep the feeling of pushing hard, but not crazy. And then I passed the 1 mile mark. 6:52. Shit. That's way too fast. Ok. now I'm trying to maintain a hard effort, but still have something left in the tank for the last mile. Not the plan.

The second mile was 7:19. Gah, over-correction. Ok, all out for this last mile. This hurt. And then it was over. In fact, that was the thing about this race, the time felt like it went fast. And it was fast 22:17. A new PR (and 5th of the 116 women aged 30-39). But Coach says if I had followed the race plan, it would have been even faster

But that's not the end of the story. I wasn't the only one with PR. Coworkers D, J and K all posted PRs too. And as I mentioned in my last post, my officemate R was running as well. I've been playing fake coach and real cheerleader to R over the last 6 weeks. This was her second attempt at the 5K distance. She ran the whole thing and smashed her goal of running in twice my time. In fact she ran sub-40 minutes. (We're gearing up now for the Jingle Bell Run 5K in 9 weeks.) To celebrate, we enjoyed a homemade brunch crepes, coffee, potatoes, fruit salad, banana bread and, yes, strata. The only thing we were missing was some post race photos.