Race Report - Winter Series 5k

It's time again for the Charleston Winter Series - a series of 3 races in December, January, and February that area runners run so they can get an awesome hoodie stay in shape throughout the cold, wet dreary winter.  The first race of the series, the 5k, was Sunday afternoon.  It's the race where I set my PR last year and the race where I was hoping to set a new PR for this year. Key word in that sentence is hoping. 

The odds were stacked pretty highly against that happening - I haven't been training properly for 5ks, it was raining, I haven't been training properly, I wasn't hydrated or fueled enough, I haven't been training properly, I had on the wrong shoes, I haven't been training properly, I was tired and had the beginnings of a bad headache, I haven't been training properly (sense a theme there??)  So, I saved the PR breaking for another day and another race, and just ran. 

You would think that with the weather being grey, foggy, wet, and miserably rainy that there wouldn't be very many runners out there.  But apparently runners are a crazy hardy bunch, so it was the biggest Winter Series 5k ever.  While I had space to run and breathe and move freely, I was never very far away from (behind or ahead of) another runner.  There was a constant stream of runners all along the course.  Pretty cool.

I was thinking at the start that maybe the miserable rain would make me run faster. It didn't. I ran my normal slow-ish pace and got soaked.  I was running at about 10 minutes per mile the whole way (a smidgen slower on mile 1 since I had to stop and retie my shoe and on mile 3 when I slowed to walk thru the water stop).  Not too fast and not too slow.  Just right for me for the day.

Every time I run on this course I'm surprised by how fast the 1st mile mark seems to appear.  It gets easier and seems to be closer every time. (So I guess, even tho I can't go fast, my training actually has paid off in some ways...) 

So my last 5k of 2012 was wet, slow, and almost miserable.  And oddly enough, I loved every minute of it.

Race Stats:
Winter Series 1 - 5k
12/9/12

Finish Time:
31:26 (Garmin)
31:14 (official)

Avg. Pace per Mile:
10:06 (Garmin)
10:04 (official)

Place:
Overall: 269 out of 376