Thursday, February 2, 2012

Wind is a pain in the butt

Last night I did a training run outside. I intended to run 3.5 at Astoria Park. The wind was freaking me out, and traffic was a bitch. Oh, and I got lost on the way to the park. Not my best time, but I logged the miles and am ready to move on. A photo of the view. Beautiful to run at the park with a view of NYC and the bridge.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Relay for Life 5K/Freeze Your Thorns Off 5K

Today, in honor of my Daddy who is fighting esophageal cancer with all he's got, I ran my very first 5K. I also finished with a PR at 30:34!!!

This coincided with his surgery to remove all of the tissue that the cancer had affected, AND a run sponsored by one of my favorite blogs, http://www.theboringrunner.com called Freeze Your Thorns Off 5K. It was cool to run once and log two races!

Anyways, back to the run…
When I arrived at the run (Homewood High School in Homewood, AL) they had bananas and doughnuts for breakfast. I picked up my runner's packet. This was not an officially timed race, so we used bibs that were a tribute to a cancer fighter.

Before starting the race, a cancer survivor came out and spoke about running saying, "We runners are always talking about things we HAVE to do: log miles, time splits, run speed drills, and we forget how lucky we are. Today we are running not because we HAVE to, but because we GET to. We are lucky."

With that, we all started the race. I pushed the first mile and ran a little below 9:00/mi. This is quite fast for me since I train closer to 11:00/mi. I realized that I needed to pull back and did. Mile 2 was very soft and I took several walk breaks. Mile 2 was also very hilly and had a couple of road crossings. At the halfway point, we turned around. The water glasses were huge and I probably spent too much time drinking. (Amazing how after the race you start to look for seconds you could have saved).
The last mile I pushed very hard to try to come in sub-30. Well it was close, but not close enough!

I am so pleased with my time. I am going to haves hard time beating this, as I normally train at 34:00 on the treadmill. I need to start augmenting my tread runs with road runs ASAP. It's just so cold…

Anyways, until next time...

Friday, January 27, 2012

My First 5K

Tomorrow I will be running my first ever 5K race. Running is something that I have been doing off and on for a while, but I have committed to training to run a Half Marathon in honor of my father who is fighting cancer.

Tomorrow, 28 January, 2012, I appropriately will be running my first 5K in Birmingham, AL at the Relay for Life kickoff in Homewood.

As I have just recently started training again after a couple of years off, I am not looking to do anything astounding tomorrow except finish the race. Based on my training runs, I should come in at around 34 minutes. Not too wonderful, but average. Eventually I would like to get my 5K time sub-30, but that’s something to work toward!

I will post tomorrow more info about the run and my experience at my first race ever!