Over 29,000 participants came out today for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in downtown Kansas City, and I was one of them. There was a timed 5K, an un-timed 5K, a 5K walk, and a 1 mile walk. I carpooled downtown with the neighbor that I run with during the week. Since I got into running later in life just to run a marathon, I never got into running 5K races. In fact, I've only run a few 5K races in my life: a couple with my daughters, and one when I got into running for the first time about five years ago. I won't embarrass myself with my actual times. Suffice it to say I have never finished a 5K race in less than 30 minutes... until today.

This summer I signed up for Speed Sessions with The Runners Edge, so I was anxious to see what I could do. My running partner, Duane, won the Nashville Marathon back in the early 80's with a 2:42, and should be way out of my league, except that bad knees hold him back now. His goal was a time around 25 minutes. That is faster than I can run, but I decided to start out with Duane anyway to see how long I could hang on. It turns out that was not very long.

Duane and I waded into the croud just behind the front pack of super competitive runners. I would have been more comfortable starting near the back, but when you have won a bunch of races in the past, like Duane has, I guess it is natural to want to start near the front. When the race began we took off at very aggressive pace. After a couple of blocks I glanced down at my Garmin and saw Duane's pace was 7:00/mile. I immediately told Duane that I was backing off. I knew that I would blow-up completely if I kept up that pace. Duane went on to run a 25:42:80, or 8:17/mile.

The temperature was in the mid-80's and the course was hilly. This was not a good day or course to attempt a PR. Coach Valdez said he expected people to run 30 seconds slower than our normal 5K pace. Since I haven't establish a 5K pace yet, I just wanted to do the best I could. In my initial time trial for Speed Sessions I ran two miles at an 8:45 pace. I figured I would probably slow to a 9:00/mile pace for a 5K, and that was close to what happened.  Here are my mile splits for the race:

Mile 1 - 8:31/mile

Mile 2 - 9:01/mile

Mile 3 - 9:19/mile

Full 5K -  28:14:45 - 9:06/mile

My Garmin recorded my run as 3.16 miles in 28:14, a 8:55/mile average. Either way, my pace was around a nine minute pace, as expected.

The good news is that I climbed out of cellar. In every race that I've run in the last five years I've finished near the bottom 10 percent. I'm happy to say that today I made it into the 43 percentile of my sex/age group (45 out of 79), and 62 percentile of all runners (881 out of 2324).  That is still a grade of F... but it's almost a low D now!  I know, I've got more work to do.