ilanarama | I won a 5k (sort of)

Yesterday I ran my first race in nearly a year, the Run the Rim 5k, and...I won! There are a whole lot of asterisks and caveats here, but it was a great feeling, and a good sign overall. The race was around the local college campus, Fort Lewis, and the start was about a mile from my new house, a perfect warm-up!

My time was 22:38, which sounds great, but actually the race was quite a bit short because the organizers (the Fort Lewis exercise science class) had to change the planned course at the last minute. My Garmin read 2.86; feeding that time into an equivalency calculator spits out 24:41 as the equivalent actual 5k time, which amusingly enough is one second slower than a 5k I ran almost exactly four years ago which I referred to as "the slowest 5k I've ever won". (So I guess it's been dethroned!) This was, like that race, a fairly small one, and I suspect the better runners mostly chose the 10k, which was two loops of the same (short) course. Incidentally, the 10k started fifteen minutes before the 5k, and the leader passed me on his second loop shortly after the 1-mile mark! Not long after that, I managed to pass the second-place woman in the 5k, and take the lead; I'd started about in the second rank of runners and had passed two other women and one man. The three leading men in the 5k were ahead of me all the way, though nobody passed me other than the 10k leader and the second-place 10k runner, who passed me in the last few hundred yards before the finish line.

My goal going into this race was to not run any miles slower than 8 minutes, and I (just) succeeded, with splits of 7:59, 7:50, and a pace of 7:56 over the last 0.86 mile. My equivalent time is also nearly a minute faster than my last race which was almost a year ago, 25:35 at the Earth Day 5k, so I feel pretty good about that. I won a $50 gift certificate to a local running store, so that's a $32 gain over my entry fee! Plus I got to get my heart pumping and do a little fast running again.