Dry Run 5k Report

I had a good run overall despite coming up short again goal wise. I have identified my weakness, which is good. My weakness is mile 2. I start to loose confidence that I can hold my pace. Once I get to the end of the 2nd mile, I get a sniff of the finish and can pick up the pace.

The race in summary was as follows. Weather was beautiful. I had a bad start position, I lined up besides lots of folks that looked pretty fit. When the gun went off, I had to weave my way through them as they were much slower than I wanted to run. At about 1/3 of the way in, I looked over my shoulder and saw that the closest runner was 100 yards or more away and that I was 20 yards off the big dogs (except Ashton, who was out of sight by that point:) ). There were no mile markers and I had not pre-run the course. I panicked a bit and lost confidence... had I run too hard too fast with the leaders? I was in no man's land. Two runners passed me in the second mile. When a third pulled a bit past me, I got mad at myself and told myself that I had not put my best mile 2 down and that he was going to be the last passer. I ran shoulder to shoulder with him for about 300 yards. When we got to what I felt was 1/2 mile out, I kicked. I was actually racing at this point. My breathing became forced and I felt the run for the first time. I passed all of the runners that passed me in mile two back plus one more and was again able to muster a full sprint at the end. Coach B even recognized that I had too much left in the tank at the end. He came up and shook my hand, told me I finished really really strong. I also shorted myself a few seconds by running to the mat instead of running through the finish. I have some more experience now and I've identified things to work on. I have a fairly good hard time to plug into the calculators, but I know that I could have done slightly better

I ran a 23:11, 12 seconds short of my goal. This is a 7:28 pace, which I know I can better. This is a new PR and is 1:16 faster than last weekend's half hearted effort. I took 3rd in my age group. I was up 25th overall, 23rd of 66 males.

Update: Bummer. they added 10 seconds to everyone's time for the official time so it's a 23:11, not 23:01. That's more inline with the time I had on my watch. I know they had some clock issues. Official time is official time though. Considering that I was held up at the start and that I ran most of the run at 10k race pace instead of 5k race pace, I'm using 23 mins as my formula number for the 5k.

Results Here