Detroit Runner - I Just Felt Like Running Virtual 5K Report

Jeff over at Detroit Runner decided to host a Virtual 5K.  One of his goals was to get participants from all 50 states and he actually did a pretty good job.  I think he had around 35-40 states represented.  The official race date is Saturday, March 5th but Jeff allowed you to complete your race up to one week before or after the official day. 

I have a busy weekend coming up so I decided to use my speed workout as my Virtual 5K race.  The workout tonight was a pretty good option since it covered almost 4 miles.  Our speed workout was to start on the far side of the track. As my running partner and I were shuffling over, we both realized we needed to go potty.  Our options were to head back to the parking lot and use the porta-potty or to head to Arby's a few blocks away.  We determined that the jaunt to Arby's would be about the right distance for the first interval so we incorporated Arby's into the workout as a continuation of our warm-up. 

The official workout was:
1000m at 5K pace, 30 sec. rest.
1 mile at 1/2 marathon pace, 30 sec. rest.
1000m at 5K pace, 30 sec. rest
1 mile at 1/2 marathon pace, 30 sec. rest
1000 m at ALL OUT pace

Our potty stop constituted our first 1000 m interval.  We finished up at the start line and took our rest time.  While we waited, I reset my watch so that I could count the remainder of the workout as my race. We started off and were grooving along at about 10:15 pace for our mile repeat.  As we hit the final turn of the first lap I realized that I never started my watch.  BOOOO, now my distance was going to be off for the 5K.  I had to add just under a 200m interval at the end to get to the official 3.1 miles for the 5K race. 

I checked my total time before the last 200 and realized I was super close to a race time below 30 minutes.  I made that my goal to do my last 200 in less than 42 seconds.   Below are my stats which had an awesome fastest pace of 6:10 per mile for maybe 1 second of that last 200m repeat!  It was hard to do that 200m and I was watching the distance on my Garmin very closely and basically stopped as soon as it hit 3.1.  My finishing time was 29:54!!!! Not bad since almost 2 miles of the race were at half marathon pace.   It was also good to see that we picked up the pace as we went through the workout (race) versus getting fatigued and slower. That is never a good sign so this is just something else to be happy about! It was extra motivating to know that I was counting this as my virtual race and it held me accountable to staying on pace.




My total distance for the night was 6 miles between the warm-up, missed lap, workout, and cooldown.  Thanks to Jeff for hosting this race. 

A Note About the Workout: Most of our running group are training for our local half marathon in early April so the workout had longer intervals that are geared towards building capacity for that distance.  The mile repeats at half marathon pace seem easy but end up being more difficult when they are following 5K pace with short rest intervals.