Ah, yes, the Downtown Westfield 5k pizza run. This was year number four running this race. Historically, it’s a slow race for me. It’s always a Wednesday after a full day of work and has a bad habit of falling on one of the hottest days of the year. It’s a recipe for disappointment every time. I’m rarely happy with my time.
This year, the weather was surprisingly nice, possibly the coolest year I’ve run it. This was a nice relief since I planning big things for this race; I wanted to break under 20 minutes. I knew that setting my goal so aggressively for this race was probably going to result in disappointment, but that’s just how I do things.
Unfortunately, right off the bat, within the first 200 feet, I knew it wasn’t going to be my race. My legs didn’t feel fast and I could feel it in my lungs that I wasn’t going to be able to maintain a 6:25 pace…even though that was exactly my pace for mile one. I gave it what I had, but I was already losing steam in the second mile. I dropped down to a 6:35 pace for mile two. Mile three was even slower.
I finished at 20:31 which is two seconds slower than my PR. TWO SECONDS! So not only did I miss my goal by quite a bit, but I didn’t even PR! I know, I know, you can’t PR every race, but this PR is almost two years old at this point. I mean, I don’t run a lot of 5ks, but still.
Oh well. At least I beat my best time for _this_ race by two full minutes.