Dave – 19:42 5K 2 days after my 63rd birthday with an arm cast

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 I hard as I could. The second mile was a little slower, coming in at 6:30 but still respectable so I just kept going. My breathing was harder and I was struggling, looking at my watch wishing I was further along in the next mile but it wasn’t, this was going to be a long mile.

I was so relieved when I saw the 3 mile marker and as I turned the corner I could see the run in with the finish line ahead. I tried to kick but it wasn’t going to be so I just tried to keep going. My last mile was 6:32 so I had slowed a little but was holding on. There was a group of colleagues cheering me on the final approach so that helped as I ran over the finish line. I came in 41^st overall with a time of 19:42, better than I expected so I was happy with the result.

Here’s my finish line photo, unfortunately the other runner was just ahead of me but you can see my cast in the photo. The good news was once again finishing a race and my hip not being an issue. I had pretty much stopped running 5K’s as they were really tough on my hip and I usually could hardly walk after finishing, but today it felt great.

Here’s a picture from the race start, you can just about see me all the way over on the left without a shirt near the front.