April 24th, 2007
Habitat for Humanity House Your Neighbor 5K Results
I have to be honest and say that the Habitat for Humanity 5K was by far the hardest 5K course Ive done so far. Its the closest Ive ever come to stopping to walk since my very first 5K attempt. I also have to say that finishing it was a pretty good sense of accomplishment that I haven’t felt on too many courses lately. I guess that there is a lot of truth in satisfaction being related to the level of difficulty of the task. My time for the race was 23:31 with an average pace of 7:36 per mile, thats about 28 seconds off my 5K PR. When I saw those results I was really surprised based on how I felt while running.
The day didn’t start off too well since I woke up 10 minutes before eight and Charlie was supposed to be picking me up in a few minutes. I had put my running shorts in the was planning on waking up in time to throw them in the drier and be ready to go. Instead I got to throw them in the drier while running around getting all my crap together and getting ready to go. Then at about a quarter after eight I finally called Charlie since he hadnt shown up yet and got no answer. After leaving a message I gave Zack a call and coordinated meeting up at the race and headed out. Luckily the delay meant that my shorts were slightly moist instead of soaked.
The race was timed solely on gun time since we only crossed the timing mat at the finish line. There were a few hundred people out there and a lot of them were college students, which makes sense since it was on NC State’s Centennial Campus. The race started on a downhill before taking a right up a moderate hill to a turnaround, then back down and straight across the starting road up a steeper hill to a turnaround. Each hill was a progression in length and grade up to the final hill. After the second hill we turned back onto the downhill we had first come down. By the second hill my legs were already burning, Im guessing from the swimming the day before and not a lot of recovery overall. The downhill we started on was a lot steeper going up than the first two hills and was kind of surprising. At this point, two miles were covered and we were back up to the false flat of the start/finish line which was really just an extremely slight raise before the big hill kicked in.
The last hill was the monster of the course and was about twice as long as the longest hill to that point with the same steepness. About halfway up I was in a pretty big battle with myself over whether to walk or keep going. I was passing people who were losing that internal battle while I kept debating. I finally saw the turnaround and basically did a screw you to myself and started to try to pick up the pace so that I could start the downhill. My heart rate monitor was pegged between 175 and 180 the entire hill and took about halfway back down to get back to 170 and under. There were a few people passing me on the downhill and I picked up the pace for what little I had left and kept my place to the finish but had no kick to pick up any places.
Zack fared a lot better on the course than I did, running it last year and knowing what to expect probably helped. In the end he came in at three minutes behind me but crushed his old 5K PR on a course that didn’t lend itself to that kind of race. Each race he gets closer and closer to my time and I fully expect him to start running me down in the next few months. My times are changing by seconds while he’s changing by minutes.
Overall a fun race and Ill be happy to do it again. If I had to find a complaint it would be that we had to tie the champion chip to our shoes with our shoelaces rather than being given zip ties. At the end, stopping and bending over to untie it was not a fun experience and I prefer the normal zip ties that you can just rip the chip off with and keep walking.
Click Here for Habitat for Humanity House Your Neighbor 5K Results
Oh yeah, I made it to the pool today and got in 50 laps (1250 yards)
