Never Quit 5K Recap ~ The Path To Riches

We survived our first 5k! The whole experience was fun. It was quite the large scale event! However, we could certainly have done without the 90 degree weather. It was fine in the shade with the ocean breeze, but running in the direct sun in that heat was quite a hurdle. It has been a great spring and all of our training jogs have been in much cooler weather closer to sunset, so I wasn't quite prepared for the heat factor.

One other slight problem that threw me off was my music situation. I had lined up a great list of pump me up tunes and had it mapped out so that I would kinda know what my pace was based on what tune was playing. Well, literally as the 10 second countdown began to start the race, I pressed play on a particular music app I've been using this last week on my phone and it says 'No License Found' and closed. Less than a minute before and every time I had tried it earlier in the day, it worked just fine. So of course, I had no time to fix that issue.

I had to start out with no music and then just put Pandora on once I got a minute or two past the starting point. That really bummed me out, because I spent the whole week hand picking tunes and I was SO looking forward to the music helping to carry me through and give me some additional energy. The app issue was my fault, it was a trial and apparently it was limited by the number of times you can run it and I must have hit that magic number, but 10 seconds before run time?

So things didn't quite start how I had planned, but after a few minutes, I put that aside and concentrated on the matter at hand, finishing the race. The first pace clock was at the 1 mile mark and my pace was almost exactly 12 minutes and my overall goal was to finish at 12 minutes or under. I was kinda surprised it was that slow actually. I felt as if I was jogging faster than I normally do and it was much more difficult due to the heat.
I did make it jogging fully until the 1.5 mile turnaround.

I slowed it down to a fast walk for a minute shortly after the turn and my legs felt like jelly. I hadn't experienced that during training and that was when I knew not to overdo it and slow things down a bit. Overall I think I took 3-4 breaks to walk for a minute or so and picked up the pace as I was approaching the finish line.

I was about to write that I didn't quite make my goal, but I stand corrected!! The times are now posted here and my time was 36:54 at a pace of 11:54!! I finished 720th out of 4189 people total. Woot! Not bad for my first race ever. I'm super psyched I made my goal...looking back, that first pace clock was based on the gun start of the race, it took me around 45 seconds to get to the starting line, so my pace was actually around 11 minutes at that point. I'm real happy with those results.

Upon hitting the finish line they were there to hand out the chocolate covered strawberry and I grabbed 2 smoothies because I was quite overheated and I slurped them right down. I really needed the fluids and the sugar. After chilling out for 10 minutes or so, I went back and watched the wifey and my friend's wife and daughter finish the race. Unfortunately when they came in, they had run out of strawberries and smoothies (oppsy). They picked up their real nice turtle necklaces and we headed off to grab our free beers and a quick snack and then headed out.

I enjoyed the training portion a lot more than I ever thought, helped by the nice cool temps. With temps hot now and humidity on the way, I think jogging season is over until the fall/winter/spring. We'll still do walks around the community and I'll probably jog on the treadmill occasionally. I do think that I will try another fun one like that at a cooler time of year. I'd like to do one more locally when it's cool out and if all goes well, maybe we'll try something like one of the Disney 5k's.

All in all it was a success and we're definitely glad we did it! Thanks Jen S for blazing the trail and getting us motivated to try it for ourselves. Are you motivated to try one yourself? Have you done a real fun 5k that you'd recommend? Here are some pictures of the fun.