Killarney 5k

First of all, please accept my apologies for the last entry. I know it wasn’t a pleasant read; thing is, it wasn’t a pleasant run either. I hope there won’t be a repeat performance, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Luckily, my stomach calmed down eventually and I dithered if I should run 5 miles on Thursday or not. I eventually decided to run, because my legs usually feel better after a recovery run than after a rest day. This meant that I wouldn’t have any rest before today’s race, but that was ok by me. I’m not focusing on the 5k, and the ongoing marathon training is more important to me.

The race start was at 7:30 pm, and I drove the 20 miles to Killarney after work. When I collected my number the woman asked me what category I’d be in, fun run or competitive. I said something like “well, I’ll run as fast as I can”, after which she put me into the fun run category. Whatever. I saw plenty of people warming up with 40 minutes to go. I didn’t copy them, just did about 10 minutes of warm-up and got to the starting line with about 2 minutes to go.

As soon as the race started, I got into a nice steady rhythm that seemed appropriate. I don’t know really how to run short races. Mike advised me to start slowly and finish strongly, Rob on the other hand just ran a 4-mile race and his strategy was to bust your lungs early on and then hold on for dear life. I settled for something in-between, a pace that I felt I would be able to hold for the next 22 or so minutes. The markers were in km, and I missed the first one. At 2km I checked my time, and it was 8:15. I didn’t have the necessary oxygen supply to my brain to convert that into minutes/mile pace (6:36, maybe I should bring a calculator along for my next race), but I figured that I was doing pretty well. More importantly, I felt good. I also did my usual trick of playing “catch the runner” once the field had settled, and once again I managed to overtake quite a number of them without being overtaken myself. Which is nice. I forgot to check my time at 3km, and at 4km it was around 17:15, which of course meant that I had slowed down a bit. I pushed on again for the last km. The last km was actually the most difficult because the finish is on top of a hill, and any strong finishing kick has to done while running uphill. I like hills, and managed a decent kick to finish in 21:03, which is a PR by 19 seconds. This was totally unexpected. I hadn’t done any speedwork, and I still felt Wednesday’s 19 miles in my legs.

As a result, I’m feeling very pleased and smug right now. Who knows, maybe I would be able to do a sub-20 minutes 5k if I trained for this distance and tapered for races like this. But I won’t, because I don’t fancy doing intervals, and anyway, according to Lydiard, marathon training is the best training for all kinds of shorter distances anyway. Oh, and one more strange thing. I used to think my max HR is 186. After my last 5k, on New Year’s Day, I thought it was 188. Today when I crossed the finish line, the HR monitor said 193! Figure that one out.

There is just one thing bugging me. If I put my 5k time into one of those race calculators, I should be able to run something like 3:24 for a marathon, yet my PR is more than 30 minutes slower than that. That’s annoying for someone who considers himself a marathon runner, even if it’s a rubbish one. Ah well, I guess I’ll have to bust a gut in Dublin 16 weeks from now.

6 Jul: 5 miles, 47:48, 9:33 pace
7 Jul: approx. 5 miles including warm-up and cool down. 5k race in 21:02, 6:47 pace