One thing I love about the running community is the positive peer pressure that is very much abundant. As you know from following my blog, I am working on my third year of running a race every month. Usually I stick to just one race a month to spare my bank account, however I can sometimes be convinced to do a little more, and that’s exactly what happened with the Mardi Gras 5k. A couple of my running friends said they were doing it… it’s a local race… it was $15… yeah, couldn’t really turn it down.
My husband has started to get the fitness bug. It started when he walked the Winterlaufe 8k earlier this month and has only increased since he started Beachbody and doing the T25 workouts. I asked him if he wanted to walk the 5k and he debated back and forth. He finally committed to doing the race because he said “I’ll probably regret it if I don’t!” Remember this readers… :)
The morning of the race my husband told me that he wanted to try actually running this race. I joked that if he beat me, I would be mad! We headed off to the race. It was a beautiful day – warm enough that I wore a short sleeve shirt and capris! We met up with my friends and I told my husband that if he wanted to hang with them, that they would be doing run/walk intervals, and that he could probably keep up with them for his first 5k. As usual, I was going into the race without any expectations – but of course, I did want to get a PR. This course was the same was the Freeze Your Fanny course that we had done in January where I had gotten 2nd in my age group, so with such awesome conditions I was very hopeful for a PR.
My hubby started off ahead of me, and I was admiring his running form, considering he is pretty much new to long distance running. When my friends slowed down for their walk intervals, he slowed with them, and I ran past. The nice thing about this course is that it does a couple of loops, so I knew I would be seeing them again soon when I looped around. My first mile was awesome – I did it in 10:30 and thought okay, if I push for negative splits, I can definitely get a PR today!
Well, I don’t really know what happened, but I definitely didn’t push harder. My second mile ended up being almost a minute slower, and my third mile wasn’t much better. I didn’t even really push myself hard at the end because I was feeling defeated. But I didn’t let that feeling last too long – I was excited to see my friends finish, and to see my husband conquer his first official 5k run!
Ken ended up finishing in 36:59 – once he recovered at the end, he was pretty cute, saying things like “I did a sub 37 minute 5k! I did a sub 12 minute pace!” I was like “Yup, we’ve got ourselves a runner!” He ended up going to hang out in the car while the girls and I went to wait for our results. No such luck in my age group this time – the speedsters definitely came out! But I did end up hearing my last name… when they announced that my husband had WON his age group! I took a picture of his medal and sent it to him. He was beaming proud when he came to claim his prize! I bought us t-shirts to remember this race by – I am such a proud wife! Our friend Rachael ended up getting second in her age group, so we had two age group award winners among our friends!
After the race, Ken and I headed to Lansing for a family get together. Of course, I had to take him to PlayMakers – come on, they were having a sale! We ended up getting him a pair of real official running shoes and got an amazing deal on them. Words cannot express how proud I am of him! And he’ll be running the BARC St. Pat’s Day race in March! Hopefully he’ll be able to get a PR!
RD on the Run 