The 5K is officially over, and I won. My official chip time was 23:33.95, which comes out to a 7:36 per mile pace. I finished 42nd out of 1,189 people. Trevor finished in 31:45.10.
I expected to beat Trevor. What I did not expect was to run a 23:33. This was my first 5K, so I didn’t really know what to expect once the race started. I’ve obviously run more than three miles before, especially when I was younger, but I’ve never actually run a 5K race or trained specifically for one.
I also barely trained for this. I originally had about three months to get ready, but I kept putting it off. By the time I finally started taking it seriously, the race was only about a month away. I trained for the first week, overdid it and got hurt. I basically lost the next week recovering, then trained for another two weeks before getting sick right before the race. So out of the three months I originally had to prepare, I probably got about three weeks of actual training.
My goal was to break 24 minutes.
As the race got closer, sub-24 became the time I was really pushing for. I thought I could do it, but I knew it was going to be tough. Then I got sick right before the race, which made me even less sure of what I was going to be able to do. At that point there wasn’t much else I could do besides rest, try to recover and show up on race day.
I was surprised when I saw 23:33. I knew I was capable of running a decent time, but I didn’t think I would run that fast, especially while sick. I didn’t just barely get under 24 minutes either. I beat my goal by more than 26 seconds and somehow finished 42nd out of 1,189 people in my first 5K. I’m pretty damn happy with that.
Then there’s Trevor.
This entire thing started because I made a comment at work that I thought I could beat him in a 5K. I wasn’t even being that serious when I said it. I was basically thinking out loud, but apparently Trevor was offended that I thought I could beat him. He challenged me to sign up for the next 5K unless I was too scared, and obviously I wasn’t going to let that go.
After weeks of trash talking, we finally got to race. I ran a 23:33. Trevor ran a 31:45. That’s more than an eight-minute difference. Needless to say, I’ve been trolling him ever since, and I plan on trolling him for a while. After all the shit talking leading up to this race, there was absolutely no chance I was going to win and then quietly move on with my life.
The time is probably the biggest surprise for me.
Beating Trevor was the original reason I signed up, and obviously that’s been fun, but I expected to beat him. The 23:33 is what I wasn’t expecting. At the beginning of September, I wasn’t in 5K shape at all. I had barely focused on fitness this year because most of my attention was going toward work, business, real estate and everything else I had going on. This race gave me a reason to finally start taking my fitness seriously again.
In about a month I lost a good amount of weight, started running again, got hurt, recovered, trained some more, got sick and then somehow ran a 23:33 in my first 5K. Now I’m curious what I could run if I actually gave myself enough time to train for one properly.