Well this has been a couple of weeks coming! Back on March 16th I found myself in Cowtown, Alberta, toeing the line for the Calgary Road Runners’ annual St. Patrick’s Day Run. I chose the 5k, in accordance with my pre-determined season plan of running a 5k, 10k, half-marathon, then a marathon – all PB’s of course! In theory, it was going to be easy to PB in this run because I’ve never actually run a 5k before. In practice though, I know how fast I should be able to run a 5k – knowing my 5k splits in half-marathons that I’ve run in the past. I had set myself a shot-in-the-dark goal of running sub-20 minutes for a 5k. Seemed hard enough to push myself, but I figured it should be doable.

On the morning of the race, my sister drove Kimberly and I to the Central Memorial High School, where the run would start and finish. It was a chilly but sunny morning and I did a bit of a warm-up while waiting for things to get going. A short jog up and down the start/finish straight, some a/b/c’s, a few strides, butt-kicks… I think I probably looked like I knew what I was doing more than I felt I knew what I was doing!

Shortly after the 10k’ers took off, they summoned the 5k’ers to the starting line and gave us all of 4 seconds notice that the race was about to start… surprise!! I started at a pretty quick pace. Whether it’s a good thing or not I’m not sure, but I kept looking at my Garmin to see what my initial pace was. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overdo it in the first km. I slowed myself down a bit but made sure I was still pushing. I ran the first km in just over four minutes – pretty close to my 20 minute pace – but I was feeling it! My second km clocked in at around 4:18 if memory serves me, and then I slowed down a bit. The roads were slightly rolling and in the third km, we went up a short but steep-ish hill that really sucked the air out of my lungs. I got passed by what appeared to be a 13 year old.

Over the top of the hill, I tried to get myself back up to speed. I knew at this point that I had no chance of hitting 20 minutes, but I wanted to keep it under 22. I recovered a bit and then there was a beautiful downhill in the final km, before ramping up again at the finish. It felt like my lungs were bleeding, but I pushed on and crossed the line in 21:58. Take that, 22 minutes!

So that wasn’t really close to my goal time but I guess everybody needs a starting point. This is also the earliest in the year that I’ve ever done a race. Back in my bike racing days, I got out to an early April race but there was never anything in March. So I’ll take the positive that I trained for the race and ran as hard as I could. Heck, I got third in my age group and won a Steamwhistle stein! Done.

I haven’t registered for anything else yet but I’m looking for another 5k or 10k near Edmonton in April. It’s probably still too early for me to go for a fast 10k time so maybe I’ll take another shot at a 5k first. I’m open to race suggestions if anybody knows of some good ones coming up?!

Cheers!