Exercise Log 10.26.13 (Jack o’ Lantern Jog ’13)

Alright today had a pretty fun time, just thought I’d make a short record of how I performed for the first of the two 5K’s I’d been training for. This one was the Jack o’ Lantern Jog that took place out in Canonsburg, PA. My pacing was sorted out by this time and I had experienced the weather with my previous day’s jog, but I gotta admit work didn’t leave me a ton of time for a good night’s rest. The race weather was extremely windy and cold, the wind just made it a bit stinging.

Still that wasn’t really the issue with the race. This particular course has 2 miles solid uphill, pretty steep at that, with 1 mile downhill again fairly steeply. So uphill was a bit brutal, I didn’t know just how much uphill I’d be doing so I tried to not overextert myself climbing. Then when the downhill section finally came, I couldn’t make up for the lost ground because going too fast downhill was just not as easy to maintain stability. So my end time was 26:49, about 2 minutes slower than my Boyce park race. My BPM was average 170, peak 184, showing I pushed myself as hard but I was limited in keeping the heart rate up because of the downhill sections (which kept my heart rate low as the challenge was less pushing myself forward, gravity was doing that, and more not falling on my face). I expect on a flatter course I’ll hit my 5K time and exceed it, but we’ll find that out next week at my next 5K (and possibly last for the year given how cold it’s getting)!

The race had awards for almost everyone, they broke up age groups to 5 year increments which to me is far too little for anything other than a race maybe of 1000+ people. So in my age group, I was third, which is nice and all and I got a little bronze award thingy, but I felt it was novelty. I did a good job, but could’ve done better had I known more about the course… that’s all I took from today’s race performance wise.

A handful of pics being posted to Flickr: