My wife surprised me earlier this week by signing us both up for a 5K this weekend despite her having to work 7 days this week and me spending the weekend redoing the kitchen floor in our house. Gotta make time for some enjoyment in life...I'm honestly exhausted right now so I'll stop rambling and get to the point.
This is one of the flatter race courses in the area we live in and it's the course I've run my best 5k time on 6 years ago (19 minutes 15 seconds). The course has changed a little bit since then and a hill was added since then (BOOOOOOO HILL) but I still managed to defeat my time goal of 21 minutes for this race.
I'm still working on getting back to the speed I was at six years ago and I have no doubt that I've yet to hit my peak even though I'm 38 years old. My wife is just now getting back into running after a year plus hiatus and I'm happy to see her getting back into it. It's nice having a partner who shares so many common interests with me.
I had it in the back of my mind that I might shock myself and come in under 20 minutes but that was more of a pipe dream at this point in my training but it was nice to get close to it! Those first 2 miles I was on pace to hit 20 minutes exactly but I kind of tanked the last mile by about 16 seconds and my 2nd mile was a few seconds slower than my first.
I was very happy with the overall result, especially since I wasn't planning on racing this weekend until a couple of days ago when she told me she'd signed us up for this race. Below are some stats showing the best few times, my time and the total number of finishers (620).
So overall I placed in the top 7% out of 620 finishers and in my age group I placed 7th out of 33 men age 35-39...tough age group!
It also really gives me confidence that I haven't yet hit my peak as far as speed goes after seeing that the 3rd overall finisher was my age and he ran it at a 5:27 / mile pace and finished in under 17 minutes. I've done a single mile that fast before but not 3 of them in a row (I probably could do about 5:50 right now for one mile).
If I don't get any more surprise races in the next month, my next race will be a 10K the last weekend in May. Seeing the time I ran today makes me want to re-evaluate my goal for that one....Maybe @toofasteddie is right and I should shoot for 42 minutes in that race instead of 44. That course has a lot of hills on it though...a lot more than this one did.
But we'll see. I'm gonna keep on training and see what happens before the brutal heat of summer restricts my training to mostly shorter runs.
Time for me to sign off...gotta get up and work on that kitchen floor some more tomorrow so I'd better get a good night's sleep after racing and doing so much else today...(sigh).