First 5K of the Year Tomorrow!

My first 5K race of the year is tomorrow! It’s a flat course and the weather should be cool and sunny; so while I am not expecting to break any land-speed records, I do hope to run a half-way decent time. I am thinking 19:30 or even a little faster should be fine considering all my mileage this year has been of the slower, easier variety.

Now some of you might be wondering what the big deal about running a 5K is? I’m training for a marathon, after all. I’ll tell you.

All races are good indicators of your general fitness, and the shorter ones are good indications of your speed. And if you want to run a good marathon, you need to have some speed. Your 5K times tell you if you have that speed. In fact, there are charts or calculators like this one that tell you what your predicated time should be for one race distance based on other race distances. While you generally want to use longer races for a good prediction, I find that my 5K time is a good general approximation for this early in the year.

So, I have an easy 3 miles this morning—just enough to stretch the old legs out—and then I will be resting my legs for the race tomorrow. Next week I will return to building my mileage, hopefully hitting 50 miles for the week. Of course, if my 5K time is off, I might just be tempted to add in some speed work…