Notes on My First 5K & Why Running?

Theme Song: Death Cab for Cutie, “Transatlanticism”

So on Independence Day, I ran my first 5K race. I didn’t do too bad. I’d met two of the goals I’d had going into it – to finish the race and to have a race time under 45 minutes.

• I placed at 183 out of 216 people who finished the race. The fastest score was just over 17 minutes, the slowest was 55 minutes.
• I placed 30th out of 33 women in my age group.
• My time was 42:14 and I averaged 13:36 minute miles. That was with walking for between 1/3 and 1/2 of each mile.
• The average speed of all runners in the race was 30:46 for the median time, 22:12 for the mode time, and 32:30 for the mean.
• The average speed for runners in my sex/age class was 32:18 median and 33:16 mean (no mode).

That’s not too bad for someone who was running their first race and who only had been seriously training for 3 weeks prior to the race – and hadn’t run for a week prior to the race due to weather.

I’ll be signing up for another 5k soon and training some more. I’d like to improve my time by at least 3 minutes.

So recently, I was asked “Ronda, is this some sort of Forrest Gump thing? I mean, all the running.

I took this question to mean – why are you so into running?

There are many things that contributed to my taking up running. Here are some of them:

• All you need to participate in running as a sport and fitness activity is a decent pair of running shoes. There’s no gym subscription, no special equipment, no trainer or coach necessary. This makes it an economical choice when it comes to cardio.
• Running builds bone density.
• I’ve always wanted to be a runner.
• I have many good friends who are runners. They’re awesome people who inspire me.
• I wanted to conquer a challenge. I’ve always struggled with running, so I want to improve that skill.
• I walk around 15 miles a week on average. I wanted to take that to a new level.

I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment completing a running workout gives me. So, yeah, in that sense, maybe it is a Forrest Gump thing…You never know, you may catch me running cross-country one day.