club 5K race #2 of the season

Our club, the Wasatch Walkers, had our 2nd handicapped race of the season today. The weather was cold (38F, ~3C) and blustery with rain and snow throughout the race, and some wind. Not too pleasant, but we still had fun...if you can call racing hard for 30-40 minutes fun :).

I was almost a minute faster than last month, at 29:38 for the 5K. Still a minute slower than my PB of 28:36, but I'll take it. Just glad to be under 30 minutes again, with all that has happened in the last 6-8 months with my foot, which incidentally did not bother me AT ALL today.

I started off hard and hoped I could hold the pace, but I think I got a little nervous about my ability to do it, and so I backed off a little. I didn't push the lap button at all the right places because I wasn't always looking at my watch when each km came up, and the course wasn't marked out by km (or miles for that matter). Actually, I really liked the course - one of our club members had her neighbor measure it on a bike, and it was on a lovely paved path around the lake at Daybreak, in South jordan. Very nice; some gently rolling small hills, but nothing more than 10-15 ft total (though they felt big when I got tired!).

I felt pretty good for the first 3K; was going comfortably hard. The last 2K were quite hard - I started to really give it my all around 3.5K and go for broke to the finish. This was also about when I started to pass people. In our handicapped races, the slowest person goes first and the fastest person (me) goes last; I had 8:53 to make up to catch Shelly, and about 6 minutes for Boyd and 5 minutes for Agnieszka. I passed Agnieszka first; I think she hasn't been training much and so she was slower than last summer's times. Then about 4 km I passed Boyd, and about 4.5 km I passed Shelly and held on for the win :). That did push me to go faster! Once I'd passed them it was tempting to slow a bit, but I wanted a fast time so kept pushing. I wonder if I had been a bit tougher mentally in the middle km (2-4) if I could have gone faster, but if I had, would I have had anything left for the last km?

Here are my splits, and average pace for each split (because I didn't get the km exactly!), and ave/max HR for each:

distance time pace/km ave HR/max HR
1.04 05:58.4 05:44.6 155/165
1.09 06:29.6 05:57.4 166/169
0.866 05:16.0 06:04.9 168/170
1.00 06:01.7 06:01.7 171/174
1.02 05:52.7 05:45.8 175/177

5 29:38.4 05:55.7 169/177

Still a bit slow. But I'm getting better. Now need to get tougher mentally. This week's workouts are challenging so that should help. I start with 20k tomorrow morning, so had better get some SLEEP first!