This is a special 5K in Searcy, AR that I include on my schedule most years. At the time of Micah’s passing, her brother was my son’s youth minister. Micah was a runner and her family started this 5K as a way to honor her memory and raise money for the high school she attended.

My husband and I spent the that weekend at our cabin nearby. The night before the race I unpacked my race clothes and gear and laid them out so that I could easily get dressed in the dark without waking him or the dogs. Unfortunately my watch slipped behind something and when I got to the race I discovered it was not in my bag.

Not being able to monitor my splits, I was forced to readjust and run by feel. I’m actually pretty good at this since its the way I used race and train in the days before we all wore special running watches. My goal was to run even splits somewhere between 7:10 and 7:20. I set up my Strava app so I would have some kind of record of the race.

This race has a lot of kids in it since it raises money for their school so I laid low at the start making sure I didn’t go out too fast. About a quarter of a mile into the race I began passing most of them and just before the one mile mark I had caught up with my Searcy Rush teammate Abi Stone and another girl. I was pretty sure we were the second, third and fourth female runners behind Abi’s mom, Tia, who was much further ahead of us.

I hung with these girls for another half mile and then the monkey jumped on my back! I could feel my heart rate was really high and yet I was loosing ground. The more I fought to hang on the worse I felt. Accepting that this was not going to be my day, I adjusted the pace to something more attainable and was actually glad I didn’t have the torture of a watch informing me how badly off pace I was!

Two more girls would pass me, one of which was another Searcy Rush teammate Abby White. I tried to run with Abby to the finish line but just couldn’t keep up with her kick. According to Strava my splits were 7:08, 7:32 and 7:58. The official results list me at a 23:32.8 which was fast enough for 6th place overall and I won the masters division!

While it wasn’t the performance I was hoping for, I gained good insight on areas I needed to work on and was thankful to be done with 5Ks for the season. My remaining races for 2018 are all 10Ks which I think is a better distance for me and I enjoy it more than the 5K.