Freeze Your Thorns Off 5K virtual race report

After a month and a half of sitting around trying to rest my strained groin muscle, I made the questionable decision tonight to take part in the Freeze Your Thorns Off 5K virtual race. It was my:

• First virtual race
• First 5K
• First time running more than a tenth of a mile consecutively since July.

So why did I do it? Well, since I've been eating Paleo and losing weight, I've been repeatedly surprising myself with athletic achievements. I figured that if I could do two consecutive yoga pushups, swim a 33-second wall-start 50 free, and run up and down staircases without getting winded, then I could probably do a 5K on a treadmill in record time with no training whatsoever. Plus, it just sounded fun, and I heard there were prizes. Hopefully not just for fast people…but I'm getting ahead of myself.

For some background, when I trained for the Ironman (mostly on the treadmill), I was running anywhere from 4.5 to 5.5 mph generally. 5.5 mph took me right up into the upper heart-rate ranges I was supposed to hit. I remember at one point I tried running a 10-minute mile, just to incorporate some "speed"work, and it was pretty tough.

So I've established that I am slow. Now I'd like to also establish that I have no idea how to pace a 5K. In marathons and half marathons, the strategy is to pick a pace you feel like you can hold forever, and then just run at that pace until you're finished or something breaks. But I didn't want to do that for this race, because I truly wanted to see how fast I could go. I thought maybe I could hold a pretty decent clip for 25 to 30 minutes, so why not go for it?

So I started out at a pretty decent clip. It wasn't bad for about the first half-mile, but then my heart started feeling like it was going to burst out of my chest. So I slowed down some, and finished the first mile in 9:40. Okay. Not bad for me, and still faster than when I was training for the Ironman.

Mile 2, I knew at that point, would not be great. But I thought if I could run a little slower and get my heart to settle back into its place, then I might be able to pick up the last mile and still break 30 minutes. My legs felt pretty good, and my breathing was fine, but my chest still felt explody, and I didn't want to go into cardiac arrest in the middle of the gym. That mile was about 11 minutes.

I started to pick up the pace again in the final mile, but I realized pretty quickly it just wasn't going to happen. I dropped down to a 13-minute-mile pace, just so I wouldn't have to actually walk, and sped up again only for the last two-tenths or so. The goal at this point was to finish, alive, in time for yoga.

Final time: 32:56, alive, and in time for yoga.
Lesson learned: Next time, train.
Other lesson learned: Losing 15+ pounds makes you faster, training or no training.