Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

It has been almost two weeks since I ran the Salt Lake 5K. I think it has taken me so long to post my results because I’m embarrassed by them. Just like last year, there was a huge pile up at the end of the race with nowhere to move. This is really dangerous when you finish a run because all your blood pools up in your legs and you faint. You can understand why I didn’t concentrate on pushing that little button on my watch. I was too busy trying to keep conscious.

When I finally looked down at my stopwatch, it said 41:37 minutes. I felt a sick feeling in my gut, thinking that I had taken that long to finish the race. That was longer than the first time I ever ran a 5K. I weighed 30 pounds more at my first race than I do now. I felt sick and it wasn’t the blood pooling in my legs causing it.

I tried to remember the last time I looked at my watch. When I passed Port O’Call, my watch said 22 minutes or so. Port O’Call is about the halfway point and seeing that time on my watch, made me speed up. If my watch read 22 minutes when I passed Port O’Call, a time of 41 minutes could be accurate, I thought to myself. I tried to hide my anxiety.

It takes days to learn what your actual time is. They just take forever to post them on the Internet and the 5K isn’t important enough to post all the results in the paper. I vividly remembered last year’s experience of looking through the Salt Lake Tribune, desperately wishing my time was there because I had forgotten to start my watch. I knew I wasn’t going to find out my real time for a few days. Before I would know for sure, I was going to have a celebratory breakfast with my family.

Luckily, running a race is so exhilarating that I could be happy, even if I did poorly on the race. We had a nice breakfast together at Lamb’s even though the service was neglectful and the food was mediocre. I was coming off a running high and not even the thought of having a bad time brought me down.

It was almost a week later when I finally found out my actual time. After looking at my actual performance, I feel great. I finished in 36:39 minutes, which means that I took only 2:24 minutes longer than last year. Considering the horrible chest cold and exercise induced asthma that I was dealing with that morning, I feel like I did a great job!

I have a bone to pick with the race directors, though. Based on my watch, it took about five minutes for me to get to the spot where they take the chips off my shoe. That is too crowded and there is too much of a pile up at the end of the race. Maybe finishing at The Gateway isn’t the best idea…

Race Results
Race: 2005 Salt Lake Marathon 5K
First Name: LAURA
Last Name: MONCUR
Sex: F
Class: F35-39
Pace: 00:11:48
Final: 00:36:39
Class Rank: 170 out of 252
Overall Rank: 2805 out of 3822

Last Year’s Results