Year 2, Week 2 Wrapup

This week was the stake 5k. I had been focusing a lot on speedwork over the last few weeks because I had wanted to put in a good showing. There are a lot of runners in my ward, and I really wanted to not embarrass myself in front of them.

The race itself was at a local park on a cross country course that is used occasionally for high school races. So, I at least knew it was measured correctly. The timing was very unofficial. It was basically a guy with a stopwatch at the finish "area" (there wasn't a marked line, so I guess you were considered finished whenever you intersected the 20 foot radius circle circumscribed about the stopwatch guy). The idea was that you would finish, the guy would tell you your time, and you would go over and write your time on a sheet next to your name. A lot of people didn't really catch the idea, so the set of people who actually had a recorded time was much smaller than the set of people who actually ran.

I was shooting for at least 25 minutes, and hoping for 24. I started a little bit too fast because I wanted to get ahead of the lumbering herd. Consequently, I got tired pretty quick. The course wasn't too well marked, but they had a few people stationed at trouble spots to keep people on the right track. There was one tricky turn, though, that had nobody posted. When I got there, I saw the arrow that cut over the parking lot, but a couple of guys who were still even with me didn't. They veered off to the right, onto the same loop that we just did. I'm sure they figured it out quickly enough, but it had to cost them at least a minute. I felt bad, but by the time I noticed they were gone, they were out of earshot.

I was pretty wiped out by the middle of mile 3, so I figured I'd slow down for 20 seconds, catch my breath, then come back with a big kick at the end. I jogged the 20 seconds, and started speeding up again right as I turned the corner into a stretch of deep sand with a massive headwind. It had been pretty windy all morning, but this was the first part of the course that ran straight into it. After finally slogging through the sand and the wind, I turned the corner again to head straight into a huge puddle. I ran really wide into some grass on the right and thought I was going around it, but the grass was just concealing more puddle, and my left foot went in ankle deep. That was about 1/4 mile from the end, so I tried to step it up after all that for a good finish. By the last 100 yards, I thought I was sprinting towards the finish line. I know I was definitely exerting myself a lot more. However, looking at the Forerunner, my speed during that time wasn't any faster than it was before the jog/sand/wind/puddle. Disappointing.

I never heard the guy tell me my time. I'm not even sure he was watching. My watch said 24:45, so that's what I wrote down. It's no more or less official than their sophisticated system. That's way better than any previous 5k I've done, but still way off of my near-term goal of 22:30. I did go back through the results of my last 5k, and if I could have run this time at that race, it would have been good for 1st in the M35-39 division. That makes me feel a little bit better.

For this race, though, that put me third out of the people in my ward. Carlos beat me by two minutes, but by the time I'm his age, he'll be 59, and maybe by then I'll have a shot. Jason also beat me by over a minute, which was surprising to me since I didn't even know he ran.

I was disappointed that so many of the other runners in the ward didn't actually run. Most of them were there, but chose to stay back with their wives and kids. That puts me higher in the standings, but it means I still don't know I match up with them. It also means they can continue to trash talk without having any opportunity to back up all their boasting.

It took forever to put all the times together to do awards, and by that time there were only a couple of dozen people left to hang around. I ended up getting 3rd place in the 30-39 age group. More accurately, you could say I had the third best time of all the people in the stake, aged 30 to 39, who were able to figure out what was expected of them with regards to recording their time. There could have been 50 people that finished ahead of me that didn't get credit for all I know. Either way, I took home a lovely certificate, wrought from Xerox and Sharpie, and a Dairy Queen gift card for the princely sum of one dollar.

My Saturdays will be tied up with long runs for the next 8 weeks, so I'm going to have to put off any further assault on the 5k until after the marathon.

I went to see the new Bond movie on Saturday. My normal movie routine is to get a large popcorn and a large cherry coke, finish the popcorn, then pick up the free refill on the way out. Saturday was the first time I was unable to actually finish the large popcorn, like it was more than I wanted, but also more than I could really handle. This would be interpreted by some to be a positive sign, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. I was especially disappointed because you can't really take good advantage of the free refill if you don't first "unfill" the bag. Turns out this theater now charges 50 cents for their free refill, so I'll be less likely to patronize their snack bar in the future anyway. I made up for the shortage of popcorn after the movie by eating both a gyro and souvlaki at Fronimo's, the Greek fast food place.

Scott asked about the totals of how much I've run in the last year and stuff. I went back into the Garmin software to check it out. My first run with the Forerunner was 11/25/07, so there's a few miles between 11/5/07 and 11/25/07 that are unaccounted for. There's also a few runs that I did without the Forerunner (like treadmill runs, or the marathon). On those, though, I entered estimates into the software so that they're included. Also included are things like walking intervals between speedwork and Sunday walks where I wanted to see how far I went.

The other problem I have is that I lent the watch to Becki a few times so that she could see how far she went and how fast. That skews my results a bit, so I went through and deleted any runs that were obviously hers (like if I showed two runs in one day, and one was significantly slower). Here's what's left:

For the year from 11/5/07 to 11/4/08 I logged 797.48 miles. Total time spent was 154 hours, 14 minutes, 20.30 seconds. That works out to a 11:36/mile pace. Total calorie expenditure: 118,884 calories.