Fastest 5k of my adult life: how did it happen?

Although these times are certainly not going to be impressive to everyone and wont be to anyone that has been doing distance running for a long period of time, it is impressive to me and was well faster than what I would normally do.

But there were some not-so secret factors involved with how it was that I managed to not just do this, but did it rather painlessly as well.

For one thing, I find it funny that my smartband considers this a "walk" and honestly, I don't know what I have to do in order to impress this app because truly walking 5km would take a lot more time than 32 minutes and 15 seconds.

The it is very difficult for me to do sub 7-minute kms but I did all of them faster than this on this particular day and why was that? Well it was because myself and 3 friends of mine all agreed to start at the same time and have a friendly competition of sorts.

The thing here is that my overall pace was actually faster than it says here, but there was a GPS failure on my end at the start of my run. In the end it wouldn't have really mattered because one of my friends ran almost all of his km's in under 6 minutes so even if we substituted my fastest km for the botched one, he still would have won.

While I did regulate my speed to keep my heart rate out of the red zone number 5 at points, I was never going as slow as this chart indicates. It was definitely a failure on the part of the technology but that is fine and it just makes me feel even better. Even with the failure of the GPS I managed to pull off a 5k where I was maintaining a steady pace from start to finish. I am unable to monitor my speed the entire time because my watch doesn't update that in real time. It does regulate my heart rate in real time though, so I just went by that.

So if I would have to guess based on basically every run I have done in the past few months, my frist km probably would have been one of my fastest. The part in km 4 where I slow down had a lot to do with terrain because where I was at that point was not flat and I had to deal with curbs and at one point, even a car that was in the way.

I'm still very happy with this pace though and I suppose my next milestone will be to get to a sub 30 minute 5k which in case you aren't good at math would mean less than 6 minutes per km average.

When the 5k was over I slowed to a walk for perhaps 500 meters to a km or so, I wasn't measuring it. But since I was quite a ways from my house I decided to start jogging again because I didn't feel like the tank was empty at all. Lo' and behold I was able to return to my previous slower pace of around 7 minutes and 20 seconds per km with extreme ease. It didn't even seem difficult after what I had done up to that point.

Since I have been doing this cardio stuff and focusing almost entirely on that and very little in the way of strength training I have seen my ability to run longer increase quite a lot in the past 2-3 months and well, that is the way it is supposed to be.

I do recognize that I don't think I would have been able to do the 5k that fast if I wasn't in an unofficial race with my friends though. A little friendly competition makes everyone move faster and all our times were significantly faster than they normally would be. I finished 2nd out of the 3 of us. The top guy, well he is in much better cardiovascular shape than the other 2, so maybe we won't include him in the next one.