2nd race of the year, 2nd win!
The Teddy Twilight is a night of racing at the local high school track. Proceeds from the event benefit the high school track team. I forget who told me about the event, but they didn’t attend. It may have been Matt who had to work. I’m glad he didn’t attend because he would have beaten me.
Anyway, the 3k. Being an odd event, I hadn’t run one in around a decade. Back then, a sub-11 was a great run, which I think I only did once… And then my legs fell apart and I became a cyclist. For those of you not big on the metrics, the race is about an eighth of a mile short of two.
With my goal for the year to go 17:59 in the 5k, I set out to find a race time predictor, threw in my goal time for the 5k as my “recent race” and it spit out an expected time of 10:27 for the 3k, or 5:37 pace.
Despite it feeling like a warm day in the sun, there was a strong breeze heading west and it was pretty frigid in the shade (I think around 38 degrees)? Not terrible running conditions, but not prime.
My friend Alex and I almost missed the start due to not realizing it’d be at the opposite side of the finish line (to account for the 7 laps [400m/ea) + 200m), but we made it, lined up with a bunch of kids and one guy who looked around our age, and were off.
Running with a pack of the track was interesting… and kind of hectic. I can’t say I really missed it. I’m a man about efficiency and any steps I had to take not right at the inside line made me hurt inside.
My watch tells me we did our first quarter mile in around 4:40 pace. I don’t know if it was having trouble with signal, but it really didn’t feel that fast. If it was, I think a sub-5 is a real possibility because I felt great until the last lap. Race splits said we weren’t going that fast and that I even ran negative splits for the race, which is opposite of what my watch says. GPS tends to have trouble on tracks.
It was hard to know who was in our age group or even care as based on last year’s results we’d be fighting for second to last place. Luckily, the event tripled in size and we found ourselves still getting lapped, but happily in the 3rd quartile of runners.
As it turned out, that other older looking fellow was 40, Alex and I were the only entrants in the 35-39 category, and therefore took home 2nd and the win, respectively. Alex also appears to have set adult PRs in the mile and two mile so that’s super awesome too.
1/4 mile splits: 1:23, 1:26, 1:26, 1:26, 1:24, 1:24, 1:21. Coach would be proud.
Final time: 10:31. A couple of seconds off what I wanted, but a PR by a large bit, and well within the margin of error on a windy day. The 5k training shall continue in earnest.
Special thanks to Ms. Rebecca for watching F and B during our race.
Leave a Reply