This is Why I Hate 5k Races!

As soon as I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon, I told Bryan Graham that I wanted his help (again) in setting up a training plan that would have me meeting (or beating) that 3:40 goal.  One of the things he needed me to do was to run a 5k.  While it didn't need to be an organized race, it did need to be a 5k distance (3.1 miles) run at what I'd do during a race.  To be honest, I was not looking forward to this at all!  For those of you who don't run, you'd probably be asking yourselves, "Why not? It's only 3.1 miles, so that's got to be easy to do, right?"  Not so!  Part of why I think I like longer distances is that you have time to ease in to your pace; you don't have to hit it right away and hang on to it.  In a 5k, though, that's not an option.  There's not a lot of distance which translates to not a lot of opportunity to make up time.  FML!  

I decided that today, Friday, would be 5k day in the morning.  I'd just run it around my 'hood.  All week, though, I was dreading this.  In fact, I did lose sleep over it!  Yes, that's how much I did not want to do this.  But, it had to be done, so that's what I did.  Let me set the stage for you: at 4:56am, it was very warm and extremely humid.  Ugggh - could it get any more miserable?  I started my watch and was off.  Since my RunKeeper gives me updates every 2 minutes, I was keeping a pace in the low 7s for a while.  Definitely not maintainable (by me).  By about a half mile in, I was already saying to myself "this sucks beyond belief; I might just keel over in my own neighborhood doing a freakin' 5k!"  (Ok, that's a touch on the dramatic side, but I really was thinking that!)  Long story short, here's how it (finally and thankfully) ended.

Hmmmmm, what are my thoughts on this?  The time is nothing spectacular.  I've done better, but that was over a year ago when my focus was not on marathons & ultras.  I guess for not really doing any speedwork for quite a while, this is decent.  But God damn, it really was not fun!   

(Would you believe me if I told you I'm doing 2 more 5ks in the upcoming weeks?  Yup!  My boss asked me to do one with her down in Deerfield Beach, and my running club puts on a July 4th race that I'll be doing since Morgan's coming here for the holiday.  It'll be semi-interesting to see if I can do better at either of those than I did with this one.)