Another Week! Another Race! Another PR!!

My wife, her sister, mother and myself ran the Cherry Festival 5k this morning. It was great and I have a new post high-school PR of 26:45 (unofficial; it might vary 1 or 2 seconds) I was thrilled! As you can see by the Polar output, I pretty much ran it through at the same pace. I by accident stopped the Polar at the 3 mile mark or so, but that didn't affect my race. What did affect it though were two area's. About 3/4 to 1 mile into the race, we had to run through the Civic Center area. It was real tight, and with 2000+ runners, there was some speed up slowing down action. Worse yet, it was rolling through that particular area, so I had to push a little harder to keep the pace up. I usually like to run the first couple miles faster, just in case I find out there isn't enough gas in tank with a 5k. The second area was more detrimental, and you can see where it happened by my heart rate drop towards the end of the race. I got caught up in a pretty good group of people, and one particular slower runner who was all over the road. I lost a good amount of time in that area and recovered OK, but there wasn't enough time or distance left to make up for it. Oh well! I'd say a near 4 minute improvement over last year is good enough!

The week went well, although I missed Thursday's run due to work and didn't want to try and squeeze it in Friday before the race.

Monday - 4 miles @ 8:25 pace
Tuesday - 4.2 miles @ 10:59 pace (felt like crap that day....ate like crap all day though)
Wednesday - 4 miles @ 9:36 pace (felt much better)
Saturday - 3.1 mile race in 26:45 (around 8:35 pace)

The next race isn't until September unless we add another in. We have two in September and two in October. There hasn't been any close races we really wanted to enter in August, but that may be for the better as its the hottest that month. Half marathon training officially starts the end of this month, and we have to start training for a very hilly run in September soon, so intervals will be replaced by hills every other week. (that'll be fun)