February 20, 2010

Roses en la Playa 5k (Race Report)

 
This morning was all about running. I had TNT training at 7am and ran for 40 minutes, finishing 4 miles, and then I had to hurry downtown for a 5k I had signed up for, Roses en la Playa. As I mentioned in my previous post, I haven't really had a great opportunity to test my capabilities on the shorter 5k distance. Especially since my pace has been getting faster on my shorter training runs, I was curious to see what I could do. After the 4 miler, however, I was a little tired and wasn't sure how much I'd be able to push it. I got to the start at Leadbetter Beach 15 minutes early and got ready. Luckily the weather decided to cooperate this morning and we had blue skies with a nice cool breeze, perfect for running : ) It was a pretty small field of runners, I would guess under 200, which actually made it a lot less congested than usual. 
Starting at Shoreline Park, the first half of the race is all uphill, and as I got going, I felt a bit sluggish. When I finally reached the turnaround, I was on pace for a PR, but my real goal was to finish in 26:XX, so I charged the downhill on the second half. As I came into the final stretch with about 0.2 left, I glanced at my Garmin and saw 26:00, so I dipped into my remaining energy stores and sprinted to the finish! When I stopped my watch, it was at 26:57, so I just barely made it! Afterward I hung out for a while, enjoying the wonderful weather and ocean breeze : ) 
 
Tomorrow I have 16 miles on the schedule, but since I wasn't able to find a running buddy it looks like I'll be running solo. I've never ran more than 11ish by myself, so I'm really not sure what's going to happen. Since I did a lot more today than I usually do, I'm not too worried about not getting in all those miles, but I'm still aiming for at least 13-15 miles. We'll see what happens!

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