My First 5K

My first race ever, a 5K, held in Bradley IL was in 2010.  It was held at Bradley Bourbonnais Community High School which is the school I went to and currently teach at. 

I "trained" for this race but not very hard.  I had never had any training run that resulted in anything less than 28 minutes.  My first mile, I took off like Prefontaine.  I ran a 7:30.  While that isn't particularly fast and I can duplicate that no problem today, at the time it was a bad decision.  It wasn't a decision that I intended but as a first time racer, I got caught up in the "gun" and the start line.  If I kept this pace it would have put me at about a 23 minute 5K.  That is 5 minutes faster than any of my training runs.  Needless to say I finished at 27:30 which I was really proud of at the time. 

You can do the math.  We are looking at about 10 minute miles for miles 2 and 3.  Not happy about that.  If fact, it took me a long time and a lot of training runs and races to get a better grasp of pacing myself and keeping a consistent cadence.  It is one of the hardest things about racing.  If there is a lesson to be learned from racing it is the splits that runners get.  As a coach now, I watch the cross athletes struggle with this as well.  A trend on our team is to really blow the 2nd mile.  This is obviously something we need to work on.

The finish was on the brand new turf field our football and soccer programs use at the school.  It is super nice and as I was starting my finish the first upchuck feeling started.  By about the 10 yards line and again at the 30 yard line it took every once of abdominal strength that I have to keep from doing it.  The race directer, who is a coworker and friend, could see I was near upchuck and frantically yelled, "don't puke on the new turf".  Needless to say, I didn't but I was certainly close.

It felt nice being a part of the running community and even though I still wasn't a "runner", It started a domino effect that would eventually develop into a love for the sport.