first race of 2012!

On Saturday I ran my first 5k of the year, the Run On! St. Paddy's Day River Run. I've done my share of 5ks but I still can't pace myself to save my life. Knowing most runners would be faster, I put myself in probably the back third of runners at the start line, but mostly kept pace with the pack for the first half of the race.

It killed me. From looking at the results after the race, most of that pack was running at a 9 to 10 minute mile pace, which I most definitely do not run at. Obviously I could not keep that up and wound up running the last mile or so about as slow as humanly possible without actually walking. I know I ran the first part way too fast because even though I slowed down SO much, I still finished in 35 minutes--an 11:24 average pace. I have a LOT of work to do with pacing myself in a crowd.

It was actually a really pretty, picturesque course, running along the river, past a little waterfall, and over some bridges with multicolored stones. If I hadn't been, oh, RUNNING or something, I probably could have gotten better shots than this:



But I'm happy to have another race bib for my corkboard. This makes three now and I have more events planned this spring. :) I'm hoping to find a 10k to do around early summertime so I can judge whether or not I want to aim for the half marathon in November. The whole time I was doing the 5k I was thinking that it was about 1/4 the distance of the half marathon, but of course feeling pukish and like death during the last mile was not the best time to be evaluating if I could do the course three more times without collapsing come November.

I'm also noticing a little more progress with my arms--my pushups and chinups are getting slightly better. In an effort to further torture myself, I'm participating in the 100 pushup challenge again, only this time with an entire facebook group of people rather than just trying to use the app on my own. I've already failed to maintain M/W/F pushups, but did at least pull off Friday's tonight so I can still start Week 2 with the group tomorrow.

Now I just have to KEEP IT UP. Easier said than done.