I have no idea where this came from. This morning I got up after a horrible sleep and looked outside, only to see pissing rain and gail force wind. At least, temperatures were above freezing. I ate my breakfast, drank my coffee. About 40 minutes before the race, I got dressed and ran slowly about 1.5 miles to the race itself where I switched my shoes to my beloved Nike Free 3.0. The Resolution Run is a low tech, self-serve race. There is no official finish time, you are supposed to time yourself, which is not a problem since I'm running with technology that aircraft carriers didn't have access to only a few years ago.
5K races are intense but because they are so short, you see the light at the end of the tunnel from the start. My previous PR on that distance was 21:44, which I ran last St-Patrick's day. I won't bore you with the race, except to tell you that it was wet, really windy and that the sun came out at the end and reflected off the wet pavement so the last 500m you had to run basically blind. I ran hard, looked at my pace on my Garmin 305 maybe 5 times and sprinted the last 200m. My Garmin shows a heart rate at the finish line of 198 bpm, which is 2 bpm higher than what I had seen before. I actually had a cramp in my left calf about a minute after the finish.
20:31. Damn. Was the course short? Maybe, but the conditions more than made up for it if it was. Exactly one year ago, I ran 23:44 on the exact same course. I think it might be possible for me to break 20 minutes. That would be unbelievable.
I wasn't really expecting much because of my two failed attempts to break my 10k PR last month. I think that was too close to my marathon and 2 week break.
This race time gives me a VDOT of 48 (see Daniel's Formula), up 3 from my previous VDOT of 45. I'll have to decide if I will use the new value for my 50 Miler training. I don't really want to, because it makes the training so much harder, but if I don't, I won't translate my gains to the longer distances so I will probably use the new adjusted paces. Harsh.
That's it for this unexpected development!
3 comments:
nice! what does the garmin say about the distance? in any event, good going, and good luck with your 50 miler training
Ramster, My Garmin shows 4.91km. According to it, my pace was 4:10/km which is much faster than my previous PR pace of 4:20/km. And the wind, my god, the wind!!!
Hey, was this the Resolution Run at the Distillery District? I've run it three years in a row and the last two years on the same course it registered as a 4.86K run which is crazy cause that's almost 150 metres short..
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