Pre-race musings

I'm probably putting to much focus on a simple 5K but for me this one is special.

The race takes place in the small town I live in and the last mile of the course goes right by my house so my kids can cheer for me from the driveway.  The start and finish line are less than 1/2 mile from my house so I can easily walk/run to and from the race for packet pickup/warmup/cool down.  Also it is the only race I've participated in since 2012.

In 2016 I ran it in a time of  ~25:30...  official chip time never registered for some odd reason so this race is undocumented.  I had only run 27.25 miles of training before the race so really was just happy to finish.

In 2017 I missed the race because I was in India for work.

In 2018 I ran it in a time of 22:24 after running for a coupe months (plus a couple months of X-training on an exercise bike before I started running).  This time was well below my goal  at the time… I hadn't come close to running a single mile under 7:30 during training and then wound up running the 7:05, 7:15, 7:25 splits for miles for an average pace of 7:13.

Going into 2019 I'm way more trained than I've been in the last few years and hoping to make an even better showing of it.  Getting back into shape over the last 1 1/2 years has been way more difficult than when I got back into shape 10 years ago but I'm finally starting to feel like things are clicking...  just hoping for health and motivation as I continue.

I really would like to break 20 minutes again but based on my workouts and trainings I don't really see this as likely this go around... so my goal is to break 21 minutes.  That's 6:45 pace which still maybe hard to hit.  I feel pretty optimistic after way over-performing my expectations in 2018 but I really don't have a good benchmark of what my true fitness is right now.

I've been tapering and my legs are starting to feel pretty good.

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Yesterday's workout was 30 easy minutes on the stationary bike at ~20MPH/305 calories plus I  walked down to the park and did 4 X Strides.

Today I ran 1.55 miles in 13:21 (8:36 pace) just to work the legs a bit and encourage some more recovery.

I already picked up my race packet and installed my bib on my race shirt so I'm pretty much ready to go!