I ran the Komen Race for the Cure 5K on Saturday; I finished in 31:52. My goal was to finish in under 30 minutes, but as some of you* wisely cautioned me, a big event like the Race for the Cure isn’t the best place to try to run with a time goal.
There were a LOT of people in Bricktown on Saturday, yo. It was 5K of weaving back and forth to get around the slower runners and walkers. I’m just happy I didn’t trip and fall, honestly.
I still think I could have finished in 30 minutes, despite the crowd, but I made a tactical error near the end; there was a big hill and instead of slowing down, I overestimated how close the finish line was and just plowed on up. Bad idea — it was further from the end than I thought and I had to struggle to recover. Whoops.
I finished 41st in my age group, out of 133 women, and 398th overall, of the women who ran for time. As my mom said, pretty darned good.**
With that said, I will also say this: at an event like Race for the Cure, where you’re surrounded by women running with pink race numbers, to designate that they are breast cancer survivors, or with the pink “in memory” flyers on their shirts, it’s hard to feel too bad about how fast or slow you finish. In fact, it’s impossible not to just feel damn lucky to be running at all.
It was a good run, honestly. In every possible way.
This morning, I ran four miles; it was my first real pace run. I’m organizing my half marathon training around various iPhone apps (hello geek runner). I’m using the SmartCoach training app to plot my runs, and I upgraded to RunKeeper Pro over the weekend, because this version has voice cues for pacing. SmarCoach used my run time from Saturday’s race to plot my pace for this training program — my goal for today’s run was a 12:40 mile. Instead I averaged 11:52, which was plenty slow. I felt good at the end, though, and I’m confident that I can run 7 miles on Saturday at that pace.
If I can run the whole seven miles without dying, I’m registering for the Austin half marathon. I’ll let you know how that goes.
*Merry is running the Marine Corps marathon in a few weeks — good luck!!!
**1241 total women ran for time.