Now that I’m back in shape to the point where running a 5K or 10K race is feasible, I’ve been trying to get out and run at least one road race a month. As part of that quest, I decided to join the Atlanta Track Club as they put on a number of races during the year which are free if you are a member. It just so happened that the first event I was able to do was their end of the year Grand Finale 5K.

I woke up nice and early that morning with no problems. Naturally, I didn’t end up with as much sleep as I had planned and got less than 6 hours of sleep. After gearing up and having a Nutri-Grain I headed out the door. The race was a mile down the street from me so I walked/jogged there as my warm up (There hasn’t been a single race yet this year I’ve had to drive to!) Upon arriving I found a lot more people than expected, but easily found registration and waited for the start. Unlike all my previous races, the course was not published online so I had no knowledge of the race course. I was a little apprehensive about this, as I like to have either run the course or checked it out on Google maps to have some landmarks. However, I always run with my Garmin 305 so gained some comfort in the fact that I could just check my watch at any time for an exact mileage check.

At 7:30am on the dot the gun went off and we were off. My goal for this race was to PR again – in fact, every race I’ve run this year has resulted in a PR and I’d like to continue that trend for as long as possible! My old PR was a 28:15 set 2 months ago, so my pacing strategy was to aim for ~9:00 minute miles. I was also hoping to negative split the race but questioned how feasible this was with no prior knowledge of the course. I was feeling good for the first mile and when I came to the time check I was surprised to see I was at 8:32. During the second mile my heart rate monitor started acting up a little bit and showed a few spikes of my heart rate to over 230. This is by no means normal (or even physically possible for my level of effort?) and while I’ll sometimes see a heart rate of 200 or so in my sprint at the end, I realized this was a hardware malfunction. However, to err on the side of caution I would slow down a bit when this happened. Between slowing down for this and also slowing down to make sure I wouldn’t burn myself out (I hadn’t run with a pace of 8:30 in a race before) I found myself finishing the 2nd mile with a pace of 8:52.

The course was a loop, so the 3rd mile was back the way the first mile came. I was feeling good and picked up pace as the mile went on. I knew that towards the end there would be a downhill section, a long flat stretch of road, and then the turn and loop in the parking deck. Once I hit that downhill I really upped the effort – I was then running with a 6:00 min/mile pace for the last probably half mile. I would later see I crossed mile 3 with a pace of 8:22 before getting to the line. The clock was visible before I got to the line and I knew I had a PR. I ended up crossing the line near 26:30! I was more than happy with this, as I had been able to drop my best time for the 5K by 1:45.

I had a great time with this race and plan to hit up more ATC events in the area. I’m also excited for my next 5K race (early September) as I feel confident that I’ll be able to drop my time even more. I felt comfortable the whole race and based on how I felt during my elevated effort the last half mile I might try to pick up he pace to that level even earlier in the race. If you’re interested in seeing the GPS and more data, you can check it out right here