SL5K and Gym Class

No, that's not my password to anything. I finished my second 5K of my life this past weekend and I DID NOT WALK!!! Hooray! Of course, it was a pretty flat course, so not much to really excuse walking. At any rate, I was glad to overcome the urge to walk, because believe me, it was there. It was there ESPECIALLY when there were more of those interval bozos on the route, and they were right in my group of people.

What am I talking about, "group of people?" Well, when you run or participate in any sort of race event, you start in a big herd and then the pack starts to settle out into some sort of paced groups. You have your front-runners, those really skinny folks who were jogging around before the event started in their specialized running gear with timing watches on and expensive sunglasses. My brother-in-law is in that group, but more on him later. Then there is the mid-pack of people who seem a mix of normal-looking people and running buffs, some running solo and some in pairs or small groups. Next we have our straggling joggers, of which I am one, and the interval people who do that annoying quick jogging and then walking pattern. Bringing up the rear we have the people who started out jogging and then gave up and walked the rest of the way and the people who set out in the beginning to walk the whole route - the walkers. I am good with all of those groups, and I know my place. I aspire to be in that mid-pack of folks. I am NOT good with the interval people. I know that I should be ok with them because technically I was one in the last race where I got intimidated by the hills and walked some, but you all recall my distress at the last race after the older dude kept using me as a marker of when to run on up ahead.

Well, dear friends, it almost happened to me again. There was an older lady who would walk and then when I would jog past her she would run on up ahead of me and start walking again. HELL NO! I was not letting that happen again. I made it up the one gradual hill on the route, and on the way down towards the finish line I passed that lady and saw her shadow coming up behind me. NO WAY! I ran faster and kept her right behind me. I knew she could not keep up that pace and she'd drop back to a walk again. She did, and I beat that lady and a couple of 20-somethings who were doing that walk/run bit as well. There is no way that these walk/run folks should beat me when I am not walking. Later, that lady got a medal in her age group of 50 to 59. Oh, the humanity.

Ok, back to my brother-in-law. That freak with the long legs finished the damn 5K in 19 min 53 sec. He got fourth place overall and second in his age group (the largest age group in the race, by the way). Sigh. He is a front runner - 6.5 minute miles. I can't run that fast for one mile, let alone three. I finished the race in 31 minutes 36 seconds. That's a 10 minute, 14 second mile. Embarrassing. He had time to go and have coffee from the time he finished until the time I wandered across the finish line (actually, I sprinted the end).

Do you all remember running the mile in gym class in high school? I hated that. I was bad at it, as you might imagine given my 5K stories. I have figured out that now I am paying to re-experience that memory through 5K running events. It's some sort of masochistic torture, I guess. But, on a bright note, I improved my time by 4 minutes from one 5K to the next (the "hills" factor, I am guessing). Perhaps, I am not merely re-living the gym class failures, but trying to re-define my vision of myself from "non-athletic band dork" to "capable runner."