10 days after my Manchester Marathon PR of 3:06:41 in England I was in Miami visiting my office where I worked for 7 years before becoming a remote employee after Covid. It was the Miami Corporate Challenge 5K Race, an event that has about 20,000 runners. I hadn’t ran a 5K for 4 years and with having my lower arm and hand in a cast from my trip at the marathon I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to run. I positioned myself near the front as I secured the top seed spot from my company which I was happy about as I didn’t want to fall during the race with so many runners. However with there being so many people there wasn’t an opportunity to warm up before the race so it was going to be a cold start, if you can say that the temperature in the high 80’s and high humidity.
Eventually after a small delay the gun went off and everyone charged forward. I couldn’t believe it when about 400 yards down we had a hairpin turn paralleling where we had just come from and everyone merged in. I was thinking great, this is going to be a cluster **** and I could easily do down in a crowd. Luckily I managed to get around without incident and had a straight road ahead of me. It felt fast, my first mile was 6:20, only abut 30 seconds faster than my marathon pace for the first 17 miles but this was much harder. The weather was a factor, probably not fully recovered from the marathon, and possible the steak I had at lunch about 6 hours before the race at 6:30pm.
I knew I would have to dig deep to keep going, I was breathing heavy, it was tough and I wanted to slow down but wouldn’t give in. I just kept telling myself it’s a 5K and you expect to feel like this so deal with it and keep going. Every step was hard, it wasn’t going to be easy, but I just pushed as … (Click Here to View Full Post and Comments)