Race Goal Revisited

I have my first race in over a year this weekend, and if you read yesterday’s post, then you will already know that my initial goal time for the race was 24:00. 

The race is a 5k; 24:00 is hardly a blistering finishing time.

Unfortunately, it seems that 24:00 may still be a little too aggressive.  Doing a little math—which I clearly should have done yesterday before setting my goal time—we discover that an average pace of 8:00/mile actually yields a finish time of 24:48.  Considering that I just set my lactate threshold at 8:45/mile not two full days ago, it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be able to go much under 8:00/mile for more than twenty minutes one way or another.  In fact, if I did the lactate threshold correctly—no guarantee there, especially with warm-up time standing as an unaccounted variable in all of this—it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to sustain a pace under 8:30/mile for the entirety of the race.  Being optimistic, let’s say I can hold 8:15/mile for 3.1 miles and finish without an injury.  At eight weeks out of the hospital with a leg infection that damned near killed me, that’s probably a more realistic goal.

An 8:15/mile pace yields a 5k time of 25:35.  If we assume a little kick at the end, that gives us a new goal time of 25:00. 

That seems slower than shit for a 5k, but it also looks like a more realistic goal, all things considered.