Bananas!

This morning I ran in the Banana Chase 5k race. It was a beautiful sunny San Francisco day, just a tad warmer than ideal for running. The premise of the race is to pass as many of the 20 or so runners in banana costumes as you can. I imagine that the main runner pack was more full of bananas to chase down and race against, but I saw very few in the middling slow pack. I ended up passing just four all together.

I was aiming for a 9 minute mile pace (28 minute finish time), but I reaped the rewards of having done almost no training for the last few months and finished in 30:24 minutes instead. That's a 9:48 minute mile pace on average, but the breakdown was 9:22/10:00/11:02(1.1 miles). I was so sad when my second mile was so much slower than my first, but I fulfilled my primary goal of never walking.

Okay, well, I walked. I walked a few steps, but I didn't walk walk, you know? Just a few steps, I swear, then right back to jogging. I purposefully slowed down several times so that I wouldn't have to stop and walk again, and I kept tabs on how my muscles and lungs and legs felt, so I knew I could keep going. The mental game is tough. Samo has told me that races hurt, and I kept that in mind as I struggled through the last mile. I need to get more used to that pain and discomfort. I also have to work on my lung and heart capacities. That means a running a much higher number of miles per week.

M ran the race too, and he did exactly what I thought he would. I called 25 minutes as his finish time, and he finished in 25:10. I said he'd run the first mile too fast, and he says he ran it so much too fast that he had to walk a whole block in the last mile and was unable to sprint the end of the race. We've vowed to run together more often, so that I can take as much advantage of his natural speed to speed me up as I can. Every Sunday we'll go for a run.

And Samo ran the race too. She finished in just over 20 minutes, and found me right after I finished. She and I were buzzing on the adrenaline, but M was just in pain. We stayed to watch the awards, and one of her teammates won the race outright, which was pretty exciting.

Update: M finished 21st out of 29 in his age group (367th overall), and I finished 32nd out of 61 in my age group (566th overall).

Update 2: Pictures!