Veterans' Day 5K

My employer is the title sponsor each year for a Veterans' Day 5K that starts and ends near Trolley Square in Wilmington. Its fifth year running happened yesterday. I've done two of the previous four of my own accord as no real mention of the race was actually made at work.

For some reason this year, we decided to make it a competition between different business units and pushed it pretty hard. I've been pushing it to my team since September; at first it seemed we were going to have about 10 people out of 25 participate. The final number was five, including me. Given that my team is not made up of athletes and former high school track stars by any stretch, I'm proud we got that many.

A couple people at work know of my knee situation and asked throughout the week if I was still planning to run it. I didn't quite know what I was going to do, even an hour before the race. My only run the previous week was a two miler in which every single step I took sent shock waves of pain through each knee and made me think it was time to call for a second opinion. Ultimately I prepared to run the race and figured I could switch to walking if the pounding wasn't well received.

Reaching down to start my watch at the starting mat, I struggled to get out from behind several first-time race-walkers who didn't know any better than to line up wherever they found themselves at the race's start. I thought I successfully hit the start button on my watch but I was also trying not to run the newbies over. I discovered the start button remained stubbornly un-pushed as I approached the one mile mark and had no idea what pace I was running at.

It didn't really matter what my pace was. I had run the first mile of the race at a decent clip and not one step yielded pain of any kind. I was surprised, more than anything, and made sure to start the watch right at the one mile mark so I could at least judge the second and third miles accordingly.

I crossed the second mile right around nine minutes flat and tried to figure out what my first mile was based on how I felt. It seemed I ran the first at least that fast and I was still pain-free so I pressed on.

I hadn't paid attention to hills or strategy at all, so the hills that greeted me in the third mile caught me off-guard. I shortened my stride, increased my frequency and tried to hang with a girl about seven seconds ahead that seemed to be handling them all right. By race's end she extended her lead to about 20 seconds, but that was fine; I notched a completely pain-free 28:05, about 30 seconds slower than my 5K PR set on the very same course earlier this year. More surprising was that my watch read 19:44 for the final 2.1 miles. That meant I averaged 9:24 per mile over that stretch. My first mile was apparently done in 28:05 - 19:44 = 8:21. Perhaps it was best my watch wasn't turned on for the first, if I had seen that fast of a time I might have panicked.

As far as race strategy goes, mine was terrible; you never want to run your fastest mile out of the gate as you can't recover that energy fast enough later on (as I proved in how much I struggled up the hills in the third mile). Ideally I would have started at the pace of my last 2.1 miles and finished at the pace of my first mile so this was completely backwards. Even so, I am inspired by the time, the lack of pain, and the fact that I coincidentally finished the race to the tune of Disturbed's "Indestructible".

I caught up with someone from work who knows of my knee issues, related my surprisingly successful story and said, "Maybe this was just what I needed to get going again." We'll find out this week. I've definitely had enough of not running the last month or so.