In 2003, the same year that I started running regularly, I signed up for my first 5K race. My goal was to run under 25 minutes which is a pace of about 8 minute per mile, and my younger brother who was a standout runner in high school agreed to pace me. My brother had some incredible 5K running talent which I’ve mentioned before, but I’ll come back to that in another post.
The race started at the community center in Bartlett, Illinois and the very flat course wound through the neighborhood roads that I also trained on. You could say that I was on my home course. This helped me mentally as I hadn’t run a race since my attempt at cross country in 8th grade. While my 8th grade experience wasn’t very fruitful from a speed standpoint as I’ve previously mentioned, I think that experience is when the running seed was planted that would take another 15 plus years to grow. Fast forward to 2003 and not only did I have a 5K planned, but I had a time goal as well.
It seems funny to me now, but I had some serious pre-race jitters due in part to my competitive nature and desire to hit my under 25 minutes goal. It definitely helped having my brother there as my pacer and he encouraged me throughout the race. This was prior to my first Garmin watch purchase, and while I had a digital watch with a stopwatch, I really didn’t know how fast I was going until I got to each mile marker so having a pacer was a great help.
I don’t remember too much about the specifics of the race, but I do know that I finished just under 25 minutes and was very happy to have met my goal. Unfortuanetly I didn’t save my offical results and haven’t been able to find them now searching back. However, there is a great website for runners called Athlinks that scours the interet for race results, and if you sign up for their service you can “claim” your results. So I have a pretty good archived history starting in 2004 of many of the races that I have run over the years with the distance, time, pace and the place I finished overall and in my class or age group. All that said, I now had my first 5K race under my belt, and as I continued to train that year two new goals popped into my head. I decided that I wanted to be able to run a 5K in under 20 minutes, and I wanted to beat my brother at the same race in 2004. Check out part 2 of the Apple Blossom 5K to see whether I was succesful.