My Thoughts on the EveryStride 5k

You know when you are watching a scary movie and there is always the person that runs through the woods at full speed without ever looking down or missing a beat? Well, I call bullshit :o) It had been raining here all week and we received an email with promise of moving the race to the road. They didn't. We were told several times that there would be split time clocks on the course, there wasn't. But so far the most annoying aspect to me was the man at the last turn that sent us out and around the trees that we had already been around. Now the course was a muddy, hilly, mushy wet mess that I will have to admit I was not ready for. I expected my time to be slower than the road but not as slow as it was. I can walk 3 miles faster than I ran the course. I expected to be slow since I just started running 9 weeks ago, I was prepared to be last but finish running. I did that. I finished and ran the whole thing except 2 hills I had to slow to a walk on. At first I was bummed about my time but then I realized I ran for 47 minutes...I ran the whole time slow or not so obviously my endurance is doing great. We all ran the same course so I wasn't at a disadvantage compared to anyone else but I will not run on grass again. My road times have been averaging 38 minutes with my best ever time being 34 minutes. I was beating myself up until some of the Nike+ people starting speaking up. The pods were registering anywhere from 3.4 to 3.6 miles for the 5k.
But I RAN 47 minutes, that is the highlight of my day ;o) The longest I have run without a warm up walk is 30 minutes. This is amazing to me and I a so proud of myself for running that long. I knew I needed to build endurance before I could build speed. So all I can do is improve from here. Jeramy's time was around 2-3 minutes off from what we know he can run it in but he was the fastest from Greenville and was in the top 50 of 1000 runners. So wet cold rainy muddy slick....yucky slow. Next year I am doing the 10K not only to push myself but because that one is on the road.

Sidenote: As runners were coming back from the 10K they were discussing how the distances weren't matching their Nike+ either. Many of them did a personal best for the race but their pods were showing less than a 10k. After traveling over to Nike's website today it looks as if Belding wasn't posted for the Nike+ Human Race 10K Results. I am hoping for everyone that put the effort in that this gets fixed but am starting to wonder if the results haven't been posted because the mandatory distance wasn't covered? I hope that isn't the case because those people ran their ass's off in some really crappy weather.