It’s not my favorite

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March 16, 2014 by Amy B

If my daughter doesn’t like something, she’ll tell you, “It’s not my favorite.” I don’t know where she picked this up (husband insists I say this all the time) but it’s kind of become this running joke in our house.

Want to wash the dishes? It’s not my favorite.

Ham salad? It’s not my favorite.

Want to run a 5K for time?

…

While I’ve run this distance plenty of times, rarely am I doing it completely balls out against the clock. This winter I put down a pretty impressive indoor time (25:26) but after yesterday’s performance, I’m wondering if my Garmin was drunk that day.

The plan: run a warmup, do the 5K, cooldown. End up somewhere around 4.5 miles.

I set up a workout in my Garmin so that it would actually record the time of the 5K and not give me weird mile lap information since I wasn’t starting the timer with the START button.

It was cold but not terribly windy, and I decided to go out and back on the highway, knowing I’d have dry pavement.

I didn’t really consider that it would be slightly uphill on the way back into town, which was really stupid.

Okay, so I realize this is only a change of about 100 ft but when you’re trying to run something for an actual time, I think this is about the dumbest thing you can do.

Warmup was fine, though slow. Picked up the pace and didn’t really pay much attention to the pace, since I was focusing most of my energy on keeping my shit together and not barfing on the side of the road (and getting run over in the process). I’ll be completely honest when I tell you that at the halfway point, I was ready to chuck this stupid “race” in the ditch and trot back home. I think I found some sort of stupid mantra to keep me going, though I can’t tell you what it was because I can’t remember. Too delirious at this point.

It turned out that I turned around a little too early and had to run past my start mark on the highway. Not the end of the world, but there’s nothing like getting back to where you think you’re finished and realizing, fuck, I have another .25 miles to run. FUCK.

28:10. Definitely NOT a PR for this distance for me, and it felt pretty awful.

Heart rate was right where it probably should be – slightly higher than a 10K rate for me. Being kind of new to this “racing” thing, I’m not sure if I did it right. I don’t feel like I had much more to give, and honestly, just the fact that I was able to hold this pace for that long is fine by me.

Conclusion: you guys can keep your 5Ks to yourself. It’s not my favorite.