Thoughts on an Upcoming 5K

It's about time for the Brian Kraft 5K!!

At last year's Brian Kraft 5K, I set a lifetime 5K PR. I lowered my 17:11 PR that I set in my 20s to 17:05 at age 43. And let's back up before that... last April, I set a lifetime 10K PR at Get in Gear. Then I PRed a month later at Brian Kraft 5K.

So this year, I PRed AGAIN at the Get in Gear 10K, but I'm not planning to PR at this upcoming 5K again. This 10K last month was on a PERFECT morning. And my 5K PR last year was a nearly perfect day. So I can't plan to lower my 5K PR again.

This is definitely a race where my goals will be shifting as the race goes on. Did I start off a bit slow? OK, work for a negative split and be fast that final mile. Did I start too fast? OK, try to hold on and don't bleed too much time. Did I start PERFECTLY fast? OK... then maybe TRY to keep the effort up... and MAYBE a PR is possible. But I'm not GUNNING for a PR right now. I might run a 17:50 and be perfectly happy with going sub-18. (And I'm not saying that will feel EASY or anything!) I'll run it hard and see where it takes me!

(In fact, running half miles of 2:44 and full mile splits of 5:28 to hit a PR is TERRIFYING to me! Those are wild numbers that I don't expect to see, but I'll power through if I start fast to see what I can do...)

I'm coming into this race off a pretty "normal" week this week, with last week being ANOTHER BIG WEEK! I've had 3 big weeks in a row:

"Intensity minutes" over the previous 4 weeks.


7 out of the last 10 weeks have been my biggest "intensity minutes" ever!


And I think last week was randomly my 4th biggest week of steps ever!
It was 156K+... behind our 2024 Yellowstone trip, 2023 Italy trip, and 2023 Jamaica trip.

With 2 big weeks of steps back-to-back, I now got put in a "150K/week" steps group in my Garmin app, instead of the "125K" group I had been in since the end of 2023. I don't expect to STAY at that level, but I've just had a few big weeks!

Taking it a little easy today and real easy tomorrow to prep for this Memorial Day race. Back with a race report on Tues or Wednesday!