Pre-Race 5K Thoughts

An interesting thing happened after my kind of crappy 10K late last month: I didn't get any faster. I've noticed for years that I have faster (and/or "easier" feeling) training runs after longer races. I may have first posted about it 2 years ago here, and then a bit more last year. But that didn't happen after the crappy 10K.

In a post last month, I shared some splits of long runs leading up to the 10K (sharing the first 3 and last 3 miles of my "pace" miles in the middle of my long runs), and now I've updated one of those graphs. Here's the 8 weeks leading up to the 10K, then 3 weeks are missing because they are "different" runs (1 easier week pre-race, then race week, and then an easier long run post-race), and then finally my next 2 weeks of long runs in grey and black:

Notice after the GREAT run on 4/4 they've all slowed down. And my 2 runs post-race were my slowest ones up there!! I just never felt GREAT post-race. Well, at least I had a confidence boosting long run on Monday.

So what's the plan for the 5K?

I don't want to try to "ease" into it as there's no time to do that in a 5K, but I just don't want to go out too hard. I want to keep my heart rate in check for the first mile. I showed my heart rate spike 2 weeks ago and still think that explains a lot of my crappy races, including my crappy 5K that I ran 4 years ago: my first mile was just a BIT too hard, and then my heart rate was most likely too high to do anything more, so those last miles SUUUUUUUUCKED.

I don't have any hard and fast time goals, and I think that might help me "ease" into the race a bit more. I've had very consistent training all fall/winter/spring and some decent speed workouts the last few months as well, so if it hadn't been for last month's slower-than-expected 10K, I'd probably be hoping to beat last year's time of 17:32. But after the slow 10K, I'm not convinced beating that time is possible, but I'd just like to keep it as low as possible (obviously). The "x-factor" here is the weather, as the forecast says it will be "hot and humid" and 91 degrees on race day! Hopefully it won't get to me too much during "just" a 5K. (Right now, it's in the 40s with a high of 63 today, and that'd be GREAT for a race, but alas...)

So I hope to just start "not too hard" and then keep slowly upping the pace. We'll see how that plan works out on Monday!