Personal Records

Started: 2009-05-10 16:12:56

Submitted: 2009-05-10 19:03:34

Visibility: World-readable

I ran cross country one year in high school. I wasn't particularly good, running 5k in roughly 25 minutes, but I did manage to enjoy myself. My best-ever race was the last race of the regular season, which I finished in 24:54. Last year I ran a 5k race in 24:48, which then became my personal record. This weekend, I ran the Flat Out 5k again, as a checkpoint for my goal race in two weeks.

My alarm woke me up at 08:00 Saturday morning, after I got back to bed after feeding Calvin around dawn. I drove down to Broomfield's Flatiron Crossing Mall, registered for the 09:00 instance of the Flat Out 5k, and had a few minutes to spare at the starting line before the start of the race. I ran aggressively, at the fastest pace I judged I could sustain over five kilometers on the up-and-down course around the mall. I apparently left my running watch in my gym locker at work, so I didn't have immediate feedback of my heartrate or my pace; I had to rely on my training to push myself just as hard as I could, but no harder, to sustain a good pace over five kilometers. I picked up my pace in the last half-mile and sprinted the last hundred meters to the finish line. Someone handed me a card saying I had qualified for wave BB, and my mind boggled. Had I really run fast enough to qualify for a wave five waves faster than my last qualifying time? And how fast was BB anyway? It took me most of the way back to my car to spot the text on the card: A 5k finish in under 22:53 matched (according to their formulas) a 10k time of under 47:25. I had cut my 5k personal record by two minutes.

I checked the results online last night and confirmed my official time at 22:49 (placing 166th out of 742 finishers): a second short of two minutes faster than my 5k personal record. I figured this was a pretty good indication of the integrity of my training program. (And possibly the brand new Nike Zoom Nucleus MC+ Men's Running Shoe I bought on Thursday, which felt great.) That works out to a per-mile pace of 7:21. I still expect to finish the Bolder Boulder in about 52 minutes; my goal for next year is beating my father's 1998 time, 49:38. (This is his best-ever time since 1996, the earliest year whose results are available online.) I want to beat my best unofficial time from 1998, 53:09; I missed my wave start that year (back in the time before RFID timing chips), so my official time was nine minutes slower. My best official time is 2008's 56:04.

Despite qualifying into wave BB, I'm going to run in wave D, which I qualified into with my Cherry Creek Sneak finish of 41:18; I already submitted my registration to join one of my employer's teams. (Last year, my employer's competitive team finished third in Corporate Division II (segregated by head-count); the second team (which I expect to be seeded into) finished tenth in the same ranking.)