Anyway, this morning, I got up bright and early (like 4:50am) to prepare for this 5K. I know I need an hour in the morning to eat something and then let the food settle/pass through, whatever. Apparently, the recommended pre-race meal of toast with peanut butter does not work out for me. I won't go into details but lets just say when I got to the starting line, my stomach was still ...not happy. We'll leave it at that.
So that combined with hot, muggy weather made for a horrible pre-race feeling. I didn't even want to race, I wasn't feeling well, I haven't been training well, and I just didn't want to do it. But of course, since I was already there, I did it anyway. I just didn't expect to have a great time... I just wanted to finish. So I could get pizza.
So now some photos:
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| The starting/finish line. |
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| Shannon and me waiting for the start. You can see in my eyes that I was not feeling up to this. lol |
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| The section we start in. It says "healthy WALKERS", but people in this section always jog after crossing the start line and then I feel slow because I'm walking and I feel pressured to go faster. But I don't want to start at the end of the pack. Dilemma. |
Okay, so the actual race.... my plan was 5 minutes warm up walk, 1 minute hard running, 1:30 of walking as fast as I felt like to recover from the hard running, then 1 minute hard running, 1:30 recovery, etc.... I was going to attempt doing that through the whole 5K.
I started off with the 5 minute warm up walk, instead of starting out slow jogging like I did for the last race - lesson learned, don't start off too fast. After about 4 minutes of warm up, I started to pick up my pace into a very slow jog because I knew the hard running was coming soon. I did pretty well with the hard running/recovery intervals for the most part. I'd say out of like 18 intervals (37 total), I walked through the running part on maybe 5 of them. I just needed more time to recover and didn't want to push too hard. Based on my RunKeeper activity log, my fastest running interval was 10:33! WHAT!! I had no idea I could even move that fast. Of course, that might have been for one of the intervals I had to cut short because I ran out of breath. The walking interval following that was 25:48 pace. lol That same log shows my slowest interval was a walking pace of 28:21 after a 10:40 running pace, so yeah, kinda balances that out. I run faster, but then I need to walk much slower to recover. I must find a happy medium here!
Anyway, I survived and I finished! My official posted time was 50:07, which is a whopping two seconds faster than my previous 5K time. Amazing, but hey, it's a new PR! Next one, I WILL be sub-50 dangit!
So then it was pizza time!
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| The line was really long. :( |
Shannon had to leave, so I waited over by the stage area for the little bit until the pizza/food area became a little less congested.
Then it was time.
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| Oranges are 100% definitely my new favorite post race snack. I ate so many. lol |
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| They also had danishes and bananas. Much better food selection than my last 5K too! |
I didn't take a picture of the pizza section because I was too anxious to get it on my plate ASAP.
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| My post race plates of deliciousness! |
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| My reason for completing this race. |
So after chowing down on all of that satisfying food, it was time for the awards ceremony. This is the WORST part for me. I will never ever win. It's always the same people that in. And there are like 5378957829 age categories (for male and female of course, so DOUBLE that) and it takes FOR-EV-ER. But the grand prize giveaway (today's was two football game tickets for any Florida football team with a night's hotel stay) is always given after the awards, so I am forced to sit there and be hot, sweaty, and miserable.
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| People waiting for the grand prize giveaway. I'm sure the majority are only waiting for that and don't really care that the top male finisher completed the 5K in 14 minutes. |
I didn't win the grand prize, or any of the lesser grand prizes, so I picked up one of these for my drive home.
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| Well deserved, in my opinion. |
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