I woke up at 5:30am today and scheduled my previous post to upload right as I was finished and waiting for the awards ceremony, teehee…

We started out towards the front of the pack, after many bathroom breaks before the race started we ended up being a smidge late to line up on the track. So I just picked us to go in towards the front. The national anthem was sung, and then we were off. First kilometer was fine, pretty swiftly at a 5:14/min kilometer pace, and we kept it up. Right before the half way mark there was a hill, and I didn’t even notice it. My breathing? Totally normal. Probably like I mentioned I’m much better at the first half than I am at the second.

The turn-around was closer than I thought – if you were doing the 10k you kept going down the road, and I thought we had much farther to go. Thankfully the first water station was around there too. I grabbed the water and swirled it around in my mouth and spit it out like one of those fountains lol. Hopefully nobody behind/beside me minded. I knew that if I swallowed it, it’d be jiggling around in my stomach and sloshing around. The second water station was about 20 feet away in case you missed the first one. That one I just grabbed a water and splashed it on my neck and face.

My running buddy was awesome coaxing me through the second half. We did the 10 and 1’s and walked twice. The second time I really needed it and I was really slow on my walks and should have kept a faster walking pace. My running friend kept YELLING at me (I love that though) to c’mon. One km left, right? She totally lied to me because I’m like alright, 1k left – not so bad. Then we were running for a while and I see the 4k banner. I looked at my watch and we were at 22 minutes. However, stupid me starts to panic. That’s where I died, I slowed down my pace (stupid stupid) and wanted to walk AGAIN. I’m like, no my boyfriend told me to just keep my legs moving and I’ll get my way there. I told my running friend to take off on me, which she did and I’m glad – because I didn’t want to slow her down. She’s ROCKING at the end of her runs, where as I die.

Anyway… the finish line comes up and I’m going at a snails pace. I don’t exactly know my time or minutes per kilometer yet because they’re not posted online. But we had to run around the every sooo long 355 meter track to the finish line. A few meters before the finish I saw one of my running friends from the gym and she yelled out to me C’MON NANCY… and that’s where I picked up my pace, for the last few meters of my run. I saw the digital sign and it said something about 28 minutes. But I’d like to know my official time and whether or not I was faster on the first, or second half. SO! I didn’t reach my goal. I’m a bit bitter about it, but then again this is the first race of the season right? I should be better by the fall. We (my running buddy and I) didn’t rank too bad in our age group… it was pretty competitive within 27-29 minutes for the winners. I was also pretty light headed at the end, and don’t remember getting my chip taken off. I was super light headed, like really. I couldn’t even chat to the people who were cheering us on at the finish line until I got some water in me and cooled down. Scorcher out there today.

Maybe I’ll inform you guys once I find my race results.

I’m way too lazy to re-read and proof read this post before publishing, so if it’s all over the place I apologize :)

So the race is over. You all are probably wondering how I did, wondering if I reached my goal of a 25 minute 5k. Well, I’ll get to that in a momento. But first I want to recap what was building up from last weeks training.

Either I was psyching myself out (which I already knew), I was going out too much, or I was getting weaker with finishing my 5k’s. The week before the race I went out with my Boyf to run the race route, I panicked and noticed he wasn’t having a difficult time doing the 5k, so I tried to speed my pace up. Even though he was the one running with me, not the other way around. I wanted to cry! I ended up doing more than my 10 and 1’s, just to impress him. Not something I recommend.

Tuesday comes around and we run a short route, but half way through we stop and do hill intervals. Race up the hill at 75% of your maximum and semi-jog down. First two times were “fine” the third time, I was like omg I cannot believe I’m doing this, why am I doing this? We have to run back to the club!

Thursday — the last run before my race we ran another route, but again half way through we stopped and did speed workouts. Awesome I thought, I’m a speedy person when I sprint — I’ll have no troubles with this. And I didn’t! I just failed to realize that I didn’t have enough energy to finish the last 2k home. I felt weak, my running buddy tried coaxing me through it telling me all sorts of things to get me motivated. Finally, about 600 meters til the “finish line”, I had to stop. My breathing was out of control and I just couldn’t get a deep breath. I was so angry at myself! I ended up walking for about 90 seconds and then picked up the pace for the rest of the jog back to the club. I knew it was all mental, I kept saying it to myself, even out loud. I just think I didn’t have enough in me due to the 4 sets of sprints we did between telephone polls. :(

I explained to my Boyf how I was feeling when I picked him up from work right after my run. He mentioned that I’m probably running too much this week and I needed to rest. So I did just that, until Sunday.

Sunday’s RACE rolls by and I…

(Dun dun dunnnnn, the suspense! Stay tuned for today’s race re-cap, later on this evening!)