Back in the summer I jumped back into fitness by signing up for the 20/20 program at the Pro Club. 20/20 is a serious weight loss program that involves both diet change (I’d characterize it as South Beach in style) and five workouts a week (including three with a personal trainer). Well, it has been quite successful so far, bringing my weight down from around 189 to about 160 over the past 5 months, and it has had the side affect of getting me back into running.

I’ve been running off and on for a long time, but ever since I put on a bunch of weight, I’ve never really felt like I could run all that fast or for very long. (Depending on your own running experience, I still can’t run very fast or for very long, but it is all relative) Now, I’ve been running three or four miles a day, five days a week and my pace has been steadily improving. So with that feeling of increased confidence, I signed up for a 5K race this weekend, the Valentine’s Love ’em or Leave ’em at Greenlake.

It was quite an experience for me, I had never run a race like this before and I really wasn’t prepared for the number of people who running at the same time. Thirteen hundred people, that’s a lot of post-race bananas.

It was amazingly organized, considering, and the start went really smooth (as far as I know… first time doing this), it only took about 30 seconds after the ‘gun’ to cross the actual start line… not bad, considering how many people were in front of me.

My finish time was 27:45, which was a bit disappointing, I had expected the competition would kick my speed up so that I could at least match the time I’ve been getting on the treadmill lately (I ran 3 miles in around 26 minutes a few days before), but I ended up running a very consistent nine minute mile (8:56) on each of the three miles. I think the real problem was that I didn’t end up doing much of a final kick, I really should have jumped my speed up for that last mile. Overall though, I did run for the full 5K, I set a time close to what I expected, and now I have a ‘baseline’ to compare against for the next one.