Boonton SRT 5K - April 26, 2020

The weird times continue, but I still will not change my training cycles.  I decided to start training for a half marathon, ostensibly to take place sometime in the early summer.  Of course, the possibility remains that there will be no race to run.  Plus, Hal Higdon's Advanced Half-Marathon training program calls for sporadic shorter races to be run during the training cycle and there are definitely none of those happening.

There were plenty, however, that were supposed to happen, such as the Boonton SRT 5K in Boonton, NJ, on April 26.

Here is a fun fact: Any race that is certified by USA Track and Field has an official course map archived at certifiedroadraces.com.  Race got canceled?  No problem!  Look up the course map and run it yourself.  The start, end and turnaround points are explained and visualized in great detail, so you can be certain of its accuracy, even more so than if you use your GPS watch.  And knowing that you can run the exact race for which you trained gives your result that much more authenticity than if you ran 3.1 miles anywhere else.

So I found the course map and ran the race (later in the day, in case anyone else had the same idea).  

It was a chilly morning for the end of April, but I wore shorts because I was taking this as seriously as if it was the actual planned event.  I was happy to blast off as quickly as possible, if only to warm up.  The first mile through the pleasant suburban neighborhood was flat and then downhill, which led me to a 5:56 - my first sub-six mile in more than five months (the first mile of the Purple Stride 5K in November).

That was not going to last and I knew it.  Things leveled off alongside some woods and the Boonton Reservoir, but what goes down must come up again, so I had to go uphill in the second mile, resulting in a 6:28.  A 36-second slowdown is a huge swing, and I was determined to pick up the pace.  

The third mile included two turnarounds, which always tend to kill momentum, and I needed all the momentum I could muster since I was rapidly running out of steam.  By the time I was on the home stretch, I was hurting.  I pushed as hard as I could, but my aging body has been on a noticeable decline, no matter how hard I train.  My legs cannot churn as quickly, my heart cannot pump as strongly, and my lungs cannot process oxygen as efficiently.  

Still, I managed to (painfully) pull out a 6:12 for the third mile and hit the finish with a 19:21, exactly one second faster than I did a few weeks prior when I did the Verona Labor Day 5K course as my own personal race.

So this is it.  This is 2020: Racing by myself, with only two competitors - the clock and the effects of aging.  Awards and medals aside, that is what it has always been about anyway.  I guess not much has changed after all.  See you later in the month for my next 10K, then.