My first 5K
Published 5.12.2007 by ~mattg
Being Mother’s Day weekend, Dana and I did the typical holiday shuffle: Saturday at Grandma G’s, Sunday at Grandma A’s. A few months ago, my sister told me my cousin Sarah and her boyfriend Dave were running in the Economy 5K the saturday of Mother’s Day weekend. Knowing that I’ve been training well and could definitely finish a 5K, I signed up to run.
Being my first organized race, I was a little nervous. I knew I could finish the distance, and I really wasn’t competing with anyone other than myself, but I was still a bit nervous. Then I got a look at the course. The elevation gain isn’t too bad (actually less than a route I run around Grandma A’s house), but there are some pretty steep grades on some of those gains which made for some slow uphill running.
Luckily I took it upon myself to find some new routes with varying elevation gains as “training,” and it helped tremendously. My overall time was 28:43 (44th place overall), which isn’t stellar but not bad for my first 5K. That works out to an average pace of 9:15 per mile. I’ve averaged under 9:00 per mile a few times in training at that distance, but that was on the track, so taking into account the hills I think I did pretty well.
Sara and Dave are planning on running the Steeler’s 5K in September. Dana and I are going to train for that one as well, although I may try to run another 5K between now and then.
In other news, Aunt Emily is running the Cleveland Marathon this weekend… Good luck to her, that’s something I’ll never do.
Filed under Personal
[...] on Saturday to celebrate Mother’s Day with her. With a short stop at Economy Park for my first 5K, we got to Grandma G’s around 10:30 which gave us a little time to visit with Grandpa G [...]