The Fake Athlete!

We went to watch the Victor Harbour Triathlon last weekend, and then ran the 5km fun run. We went feeling like fairly fit individuals, and left feeling like fake athletes! Jeeez there are some fit people out there. Even the short distance triathlon looked hard, and then there was the olympic distance one, and after you cope with the average fit athlete doing this, there are the elites doing it in amazing times. A 1.5 km swim/40km bike ride/10 km run done in under 2 hours! We're still sort of encouraged to give it a go next year, but man you really feel like the lightweight athlete: training 6 days a week, and then just running a mere 5 kms!

Ah well - I have to consider where I've come from though don't I. The 5 km was an interesting experience. It is my third race. The first was a local, low key 4 km about 10 months ago. It was first time running on the road, and I was terrified I couldn't make the distance. It was very tough, nearly killed me and I just kept concentrating on putting on foot in front of the other. Then it was the 12 km city to bay - also terrified about the distance- and used a walk/run strategy (run for 5mins, walk for 2mins to drop my heart rate). Both big achievements for me. But for this 5 kms I didn't really give it much thought - after all I'm running much longer distances now, I never go out and run anything less than 5kms - so I really just viewed it as another training run for the half marathon, and didn't alter my training schedule at all. (Mistake number one). I ran 14 kms on the Friday as planned, and just hoped that if I had a day off on Saturday I would be recovered enough for Sunday. I also decided that I would like to use the race to achieve a PB - I've always wanted to break the 30 min mark for 5 kms, previous best time about 31 mins - so I thought I'd give it a go.

Did I achieve it? YES - 29:08 - but it was b****y hard and I was really cross with myself.


I went out too hard/too fast without realising it. Ran the first km in 5:15 which I have NEVER done before, not even close. I set my Garmin to show me a pacer man on the screen - ie I told it I wanted to run the 5 kms in 29:30, and it then displayed me and a little pacer man on the screen, and below this it told me how far ahead/behind I was of the pacer man. I good idea I thought, but I had difficulties translating this into running speed. Whilst I was looking down at it thinking - good I'm 168m ahead of schedule, my brain didn't think clearly enough - "168m in 1 km - that's way too fast" and so what happened was that after the 1st km I was buggered! I couldn't work out why I was finding the race sooo hard - when i run this distance all the time.

I had to keep telling myself from there on in to SLOW DOWN or I wasn't going to be able to even finish. About halfway through I finally realised that I really needed to change the display on my Garmin to show my speed, which I did, and this really helped. Looking at my splits and heart rate for the race, my HR was at 168 bpm in the first km, and then this gradually slowed with my speed - down to a far more comfortable 120bpm in the last km.

I could have still achieved this PB, but possibly done better, if not far more comfortably if I had:

• Paced myself appropriately at the beginning, and not been influenced by the crowd
• Respected the distance in a race setting and tapered even a little for it. My legs were soo tired when I ran this, I'm sure the big run 48 hrs beforehand affected this
• Realised how much of an impact even a small increase in speed has on your capacity to cover any distance - and how much this impacts on HR. Basically I was running this race with really tired legs, and a much higher than average heart rate due to running faster - no wonder it was so damn hard!

Agh well - even though I have read this sort of thing on other peoples blogs, I guess experience is the best teacher!

Still - 29:08 - a 2 min improvement over 5 kms - gotta be happy with that!