Race for Hope 5K Recap

There’s a lot that I want to mention about my first 5K.  There’s a lot of happiness, sadness, and disappointment.  A wide range of emotions, you could say.  First off let me give you a short recap of the day. . .  I woke up at 4:30am to eat a good breakfast.  I chose to stick with instant oatmeal, because that’s what I’ve been having during the majority of my training runs.  My gear/clothing for the race included the following.

• Champion capris
• Under Armour Fitted Mock
• Race t-shirt
• Champion sport bra
• SpiBelt to hold my ID, cash, & iPhone
• iPod with Nike+ censor
• Nike Air Max Moto+9

We got to the race around 6:30, which gave us time to find street parking, complain about how cold it was, and finally make our way over to the Art Museum.  At 6:30 there wasn’t that many people at the event yet, but by 7am, the place was packed.  Survivors, teams, and individual runners all crowded around the registration and food tents.  It was so amazing to see everyone there supporting each other.  At around 7:40, I made my way to the starting line to do group stretch, hear some uplifting advice from the speaker, and hear the Star Spangled Banner being sung.  I got a little teary eyed when the speaker mentioned all the survivors in the pack.  The race started a little after 8am, and honestly it was a beautiful route.

I started the race with “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, in honor of my mom.  She had a thing for Mick Jagger.  I don’t know maybe it was the huge lips and skinny frame… not sure.  I got a bit discouraged as I saw a lot of people passing me.  I knew I wanted to maintain a steady pace the entire time in order to prevent myself from ever walking or stopping for air.  I’m proud of myself in that aspect, because I can’t remember a time I actually had to walk through the race.  However, it all fell apart once I realized that my Nike+ was off.  It froze my iPod halfway through the race, thus I lost my music and my tracking/pacing system.  I was so upset.  I knew I should have purchased a Garmin a long time ago, but felt that I could get away with using the Nike chip instead for a few months.  I think that my chip had been off for the majority of my training, although I calibrated it to ensure accuracy.  I was so discouraged, and had to slow down a bit to try and fix my iPod.  I ended up ripping it out of my ears and running without it the rest of the way.  Upset, I tried to keep pushing.  I ended up finishing the race at an official time of 30:11.  If you’d been following my training updates here on my blog, you know that I’ve been running a 24-26 minute 5K for the past few weeks.  I’m not sure what happened.  All I can think is that my chip was feeding me wrong information the entire time.

Although I finished at a much higher time that I thought I would, there was nothing disappointing about running that last .1 mile.  The feeling of running through the finish line and having the crowd cheer you on is indescribable.  A feeling that is making me sign up for another race as soon as possible.  This time I will make sure to train more appropriately.

Here are some pictures from the day.

I can’t wait to go and run another race and try and beat my 5K time.
Although I didn’t expect to finish with a 30min 5K, all I can do at this point is keep training for a lower time for the next race.