Athletes are funny. If you watch Ted Lasso, you know what I mean. The last couple of episodes have been on an injured football player. I can identify. Tomorrow is the Boulder Marathon and I’m massively disappointed that I can’t run the distance because I’d been prepping for it all year. I was confident I’d win my age division and more importantly, I thought I had a shot at breaking 3:30.
I’ve tried to stay positive. I’ve made the 5K my consolation prize. I might push myself a bit harder than my PT has advised. He said keep it a tempo run. My plan is more of a threshold run. Same thing to some people but I think of a threshold run as being 10% harder than tempo. 90% instead of 80%.
I’ve studied the podium finishers from earlier races for my age group. I said athletes were funny. Their chip time equals their gun time, which means they start on the starting line. A bunch of seniors think they are there to race. I laugh every time I picture it. I don’t have much experience running 5Ks and I don’t know my pace. I know how to feel threshold though so I’ll start right behind them but I won’t keep pace the first quarter mile. I’ll keep it conservative and warm up. At 23rd Street, which I figure is a quarter mile, I’ll surge and find my threshold pace. A 5K is short, but not that short. I’ll catch those guys before we turn around at Foothills Parkway.
Turning this into a race makes this more fun for me. My race strategy won’t involve fueling and hydration, at least not to the degree a marathon would, but I have a 23rd Street race strategy. I bet those podiums finishers from last year don’t have that. A 21:43 won my age last year. A 7 minute pace. Not sure I can do that but I’m fixing to find out.
The SWT race photo is meaningful because I plan to wear a SWT racing singlet tomorrow.
