Minutes Before my First 5K
You may have noticed that the posts regarding my progress in the Couch to 5K training program ended awhile ago. Unfortunately I had to put the running with the Couch to 5K on hold due to an injury. An injury that aggravated my tendonitis to the point that going on any of the C25K runs may have prevented me from reaching my goal of completing a 5K in today’s race.
Since I missed about three weeks of training, my goal went from finishing below 30 minutes to completing the 5K before the people walking the course. I’m please to report that I did finish before the walkers. I’m still waiting to find out my official time. It was a great feeling to cross the finish line and reach my goal! My wife and I ran together and stepped on finish line at just about the same time.
I had a few problems that really had me frustrated. Minutes before the race the announcer had everyone look at their shoe to make sure we all had a timing chip on our shoelaces. I looked down and saw…that I had attached the wrong part of the timing chip to my shoe. I was helping my wife with her chip and I just quickly attached mine to my shoe. I sprinted back to the car and attached the correct chip to the shoe. Then I sprinted back to the starting line to get in line. As I approached the starting line, I was shocked to see just about everyone was already headed down the course. I ran down to where I was standing a few minutes before to start my first 5K at the very last place. I quickly caught up with my wife who had already was a couple of blocks down the course.
During all this confusion I forgot to hit the start button on my heart rate monitor to monitor how we were doing in the race. I clicked the start button anyway so I could monitor how hard I was pushing myself.
At the end of the race I entered my bib number into the computer terminal to retrieve my time and was surprised to see some other person’s name and data pop up on the screen. I thought maybe I had entered the number wrong, so I punched the number in again. The race volunteers told me to call the office on Monday and they would straighten it out and retrieve my race time.
Right now my knee feels good and after a couple of days of rest, I’ll be back at the Couch to 5K training and finish out the program so that I can finish what I started. Next goal is to get my race time to 30 minutes or less for the next 5K in November.
