Strider 5K Handicap Run

This evening my running club, the Houston Striders, held their 5K Handicap Run, which is designed to level the playing field by adjusting everyone's start time based on their current 5K fitness. For example, if the slowest person runs a 35 minute 5K and you typically run a 20 minute 5K you would start 15 minutes after them. Ideally everyone would cross the finish line exactly even with everyone else. But of course some people (like me) haven't run a 5K race in a while and others pad their number so it never works out exactly but it's a great concept and a good time was had by all.

Since I haven't run a 5K race since last September, I took my 10K time from this past weekend and plugged it into a race predictor, which spat out a 19:10 or so. I put down 19:30 for a little breathing room and hoped that I didn't add any more cushion than the next person. I finished 9th, out of about 25 or so, thus my cushion didn't result in any unfair advantage, though I did blow 19:30 away.

I was the 3rd to last person to take off. Only Andrew Keller, who had put down an 18 flat, and John Yoder, who had put down a 17 flat, started behind me. It was very cool starting off on my own. No pack to slow me down or speed me up. But I still started too fast and had to rein things in a bit after the first few minutes. I was still hammering though and settled into a pace that I figured would be tough to maintain for 3.1 miles, but I'd cross that bridge when I got to it. I hit the first mile marker in a smoking 5:42. I had what wind there was in my face for much of mile one so I thought I might have a shot of hanging on in mile two without much drift. I hit the two mile mark in 11:25, meaning I'd done mile two in 5:43. Holy crap! My PR is 18:11, which meant that even if I could only manage a six minute mile three I'd still have 35 seconds to cover the final tenth to get in under the long-sought 18 minute barrier.

I passed my first few people just after the two mile mark but only got a couple more before I was maybe 1/2 a mile from the finish. I reeled in a few more but as we closed in on the home stretch I looked up ahead and could see that although I would surely pass several more I wouldn't catch all of them. I hit the three mile mark in 17:05. Now the PR was going to crush my old one. But I could see that the distance yet to cover was certainly more than .1 mile. I covered it in 46 seconds, whereas I usually cover the final tenth of a 5K in about 30 seconds. My total time was 17:51, an awesome 20 second improvement on my PR.

But you know my next question, don't you? Accurate course? That first mile of 5:42 I could believe, but a 2nd mile of 5:43 and a third mile of 5:40? Pretty hard to swallow. Sure enough, after checking with some Garmin wearers, it was about .1 mile short. I heard anywhere from 2.99 to 3.06. I'll settle on a conservative three miles flat. But that still equates to an 18:27, my second best 5K ever. I'll take it all day long.