Ilanarama!

So there was this XKCD comic, which inspired the Up-Goer-Five Text Editor, which allows forces you to write using only the thousand most common English words. And now my friends are using it to rewrite their job descriptions. Bandwagon, jump, whee!

I work in my house, using a computer to reach other computers. These computers make a pretend world inside them, with pretend air and water and rain and land, and then they show what the pretend world will be like in a hundred years or two hundred years or even more. We use this to guess how things might be like in the real world then, because we are worried that it will be very warm, warmer than it is now across the whole world.

Then I take the answers the computer makes, and I pull out each thing (like how warm the air is, or how strong the wind is, or how much ice is at the top and bottom of the world) and put it in a computer place for other people who study the world and how warm it might get.

But what I write about here is usually the things I like that are not work. I run a lot, and I like to run very far. I also like to ride a thing that moves on two round parts that go around when I push other parts of it with my legs. In the summer I walk in the woods and sleep there at night, and in the not-summer (like now) I go to a place where I get pulled up to a high place and I go back down on two long things like wide sticks under my feet.

cahotage took a photo of the amusing gas-station sign I mentioned last month!

So, I ran a 5K on Friday night.

Before I whine (and I am going to whine, so consider this a Whine Warning) I feel obliged to acknowledge that most of you reading this are not competitive runners. Some of you have run 5Ks and would be very happy indeed to run them as fast as I do. And yes, my time is a course PR for me. So I should not complain. But complain I shall.

I plugged the time of my awesome half-marathon into the McMillan calculator (Warning: the site plays music but it goes away when you hit "calculate") and it told me that my equivalent performance in a 5K would be 22:34. Now, I had run this particular course twice before, both times around 24:25, and I am far more of an endurance runner than a speed runner, and some recent workouts had confirmed for me that there was no way I could possibly keep a 7:16 per mile pace going, so I wasn't really aiming at that. But I thought a 23:30 would be reasonable, and my pixie dust goal was to break 23 minutes.

5Ks are popular because most people who are capable of walking can usually finish them in an hour or so, and most beginning runners can run them continuously, as a first race. To really race them well, though, means running at basically top speed, just sub-barfing. I don't enjoy running 5Ks. It's too painful.

I did not break 23 minutes. I barely broke 24, coming in at 23:57, miserable and breathless, and passed by another woman in the last 100 yards. But worst of all, I was beaten by a woman pushing two kids in a double stroller. She came in 4th, with the beautifully symmetric time of 22:22 (which is why I remembered it). I came in 7th.

Strollered by a doublewide. I am mortified.