Calvin’s Hub

This morning my wife and I accomplished our first ever race. We only did the 5K run  at the Fort for the adidas King of the Road marathon. It was tiring but really fun and very satisfying (close to the feeling you get when you labor for an hour to clean a dirty toilet).

I wonder why they placed Start on the side of the finish line

I managed to get a little under an hour (about 53 minutes) to complete the 5k. That’s pretty slow if a good time to aim in the first try is around 40 minutes. I don’t think the time is accurate though. More on that later.

There were a LOT of participants in the race that it’s hard to find a good running rhythm especially when the road becomes narrower. “Ano ‘to? Alay-lakad?”

Anyway, being the first run that we did, here are some lessons we’ve learned to help us on our next run (oo seryoso na ‘to).

• Get adequate rest and sleep before the race. Yeah I know this is common sense but we went to EK the day before and got home at around 12 mn already. We only got 4 hours of sleep and we think we could’ve done better had we managed to get more sleep.
• Eat an energy bar an hour before the race. We ate one of those energy bars packing 240 calories and it helped a lot for our sleep-deprived body. I think I did well here compared to our weekly runs.
• Bring a pedometer. A lot of people who had their own pedometer pegged the distance of our race at roughly around 6k. You can hear a lot of “Anoo?? 2k pa lang?”
• Bring your own timer or stopwatch. If there are a lot of people in the starting line, it will take some time for those at the back to cross it and this will render the universal timer useless to some. This is why I was quite unsure of my time.
• Bring some music. If you want to have a good run, you should have a way to tune out noise that may mess up your rhythm. I would like to listen to drum beats that I can use to time my stride next time.
• Bring your own water. If you’re uncomfortable drinking from water stations where they just scoop the water from a huge container, bring your own hydration pack. Actually, all you need to do is swirl the water they give you in and spit it out just to cool and wet your mouth. And maybe pour some on your head to cool it.
• Deep breathing works. I learned that when you take deep breaths when running, you will have more staying power. If you feel that you’re breathing too fast, slow down to a walk to control it before running again.
• Dash to the finish line. No matter how exhausted you are, once you see the FINISH line, you will always have that sudden burst of energy to dash and make it across the line. And you should bask yourself in that rewarding feeling.

Hmmm. That’s a lot of stuff that we’ve learned but of course, the most important thing in a short run is having fun with your friends. Pero baduy naman if you’re going to walk for the most part of the 5k and just chat with your friends. There’s a lot of time for chitchat afterwards.

Next run will be on November. I’ll probably keep on doing 5k until I accomplish it in 30 minutes before going to 10k.

Run ka na rin! It’s fun!

• Ran for Mother Earth at the Earth Run 2010
• Our Philstar Celebrity Run 2009 5k experience
• What went Fit ‘n Wrong
• Join Coach Rio at the Looney Tunes Active! Fun Run 2010

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