Paleo Dan

I dislike hills. I dislike standing around in the cold on those hills waiting for races to start. I much prefer my home turf down at the Beach where an elevation gain of 10′ over the 5K is a big climb.

The wife and I are in Mount Airy, North Carolina with our three kids visiting my wife’s grandparents. Normally, for me, it’s a time to vegetate and eat. This year, though, I decided to change things up and run a 5K turkey trot. So that’s what I did this morning down in Winston-Salem, NC.

I didn’t get many photos… I completely forgot once I had gotten started on the run. Oh well. I don’t have too much to say about the race except it was up and down and up and down and… well, you get the idea. As usual, I ran in my Vibram FiveFingers KSOs. Also as usual, I got quite a few glances, comments, and questions… all of them positive. Even with my Injinji toe socks, my feet were still cold waiting around for an hour before the start. But once we got moving, all was well.

This was my fastest 5K yet with a time of 31:34 (10:11/mile)… an improvement of over 1 minute over my last 5K in October. Still slower than I want to go, but I am very happy with improvement.

My next race, wherever and whenever it might be, I’ll take photos. I promise.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! Time to eat!!!

A week ago, I posted about some of my goals for 2010. A few days ago, I took the first step toward achieving those goals. My goal time is 2:10. Realistic? Probably not considering that my first half was 3:03.

So why did I pick 2:10?

Well, I use a couple of cool apps from Maverick Software: Race Pace and TriCalc. Race Pace is pretty cool in that if you give it a finish time for a particular distance, it can give you a rough idea of your finish time and pacing for other distances. Accurate? I don’t know, but it’s the best I got right now.

Well, using Race Pace, I entered my 5K PR of 32:45 and it estimates a half marathon time of about 2:30. I believe, however, that I can do much better than 32:45 in the 5K. For one thing, I was 271 pounds when I did the Komen. Considering that I’m already down to 262 and plan to be less than 225 by the time of the half, I expect to be a faster, stronger runner by then.

Because of that, I just decided to shoot for faster time than Race Pace was giving me. I chose 2:10 for no good reason aside from the fact that I think I can do it. I put 2:10 into Race Pace for the half marathon and it’s telling me that I should be able to do a 28:15 5K… Yeah, I think I can do that. I recall seeing a table in Runner’s World that shows improvements expected at certain levels of weight loss. Yeah, I know that it’s a very, very rough guide at best, but I’ll go with it for now… extrapolating from that table and given my weight loss goal, I am expecting a 5 minute improvement in my 5K time to about 27:22.

Yeah, I think I can do that. I will do that.

Oh, as I side note: I signed up for a Thanksgiving Day 5K: the Turkey Strut 5K in Winston-Salem.