Hooray! My first race of the season done — the 100% Irish for a Day 5k. The race started at 9:15 this morning, so I tried to go to bed slightly earlier than usual. I turned my light off at half past midnight, but because I hadn’t taken any Benedryl (I didn’t want to wake up feeling groggy), I didn’t actually fall asleep until 1:00, and even then it was quite patchy sleep, because the inside of my head was so itchy. And when I did sleep, I dreamt about running (and all the things that might go wrong — and also one dream about a kitten, which had nothing to do with the race).
So I rolled out of bed at 7:30 this morning, got dressed, and made myself a light breakfast, because there’s no way I can run without eating first (but I knew I wouldn’t have as much time as usual to digest, so I couldn’t eat what I usually do). I didn’t even make coffee — just had a few sips of tea with my almond butter toast and cantaloupe.
The run was around Lake Harriet, and I expected getting there and parking to be much more of an ordeal than it was (my mom drove). We wandered around a bit, took a photo, saw some crazy outfits, and then people started lining up for the 5k. There was a decent crowd, but it moved along pretty quickly.
Thanks to all the strange running dreams I’d had the night before, the race itself now feels slightly unreal (that might also be due to my starting and finishing the race all before I’d typically be out of bed). I hit mile one at exactly my training pace, and I was a little behind at the second mile, so I must have kicked it up a notch, because I wound up finishing more than a minute under my target time. There was never a question of whether or not I’d run the whole thing, but I would have been a little disappointed to run it more slowly than I’d hoped, so I’m very pleased with the result.
Now I can really settle into my 10k training for the race near the end of April. Running, whee!
I’m glad this race experience was a good one! Keep it up.