< 25 min 5k?

(5k in September 2008)

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I’ve been training for an upcoming road race. It’s just a 5km running race here locally. I’ve had the urge to do another race and as you can see in my sidebar, I have a goal that I’d like to accomplish. My first and only 5k race was in September 2008 (recap here) and I had a goal of doing it in under 30 minutes. Which I did. Spot on, thirty minutes.

This time I want to try for 25 minutes. Yeah, quite the difference. I have been training since April and going a minimum of 2x per week. I have a new running buddy and we often go together and skip the running group class where we started off with, but still go there once a week.

We’re going by the ten and one rule. No more than 10 minutes of running at a time. 10 minutes jog, 1 minute off. Rinse and repeat til you’re done your 5k.

Last Friday we ran 4.08k in 23:15 which is a pace of 5:41 minutes per kilometer (or 9:10 min mile if you’re American). Too slow for my liking, especially if I wanted to break my record and do a 25 min 5k. We’d have to bring that down to a 5 minute kilometer, respectively.

On Wednesday we ran 4.35k in 22:28 — a much quicker pace. Dedicated, probably because I was disappointed at my previous time. That equals out to a 5:09 minute kilometer (8:18/mile).

Thursday we ran with our group but ran ahead a bit to pick up the pace. I started off way too fast and ended up being about 300 meter in front of the “fast people” yesterday and wore myself out towards the end since we had to climb two hills. I ran the 4.9k in 26:57, but really it was 25:57 since the first minute of the run was actually a walking minute. So if I went by th 26 minute time, I ran at 5:30 minute kilometer. I think it was fine. It was hard because of the ginormous hill we did — which wasn’t all that bad but I was literally swearing under my breath, probably because I wore myself out on the first quarter of the run.

<25 min 5k? I think it’s doable. I’m getting less and less nervous each time I run. I used to die from being nervous, having stomach cramps and all that not so nice stuff before I headed out on a run. Now I’m all… LETS DO THIS.

How did I track my pace? Well I’m not good with math, but I did find a really neat site that will tell you your pace distance or time. It’s much cheaper than buying a Garmin :)