Run in the Parks 5K: Race Recap

Last week on the 4th of July Henri, Lavinia, my mom and I ran the Run in the Parks 5K down in Laguna Niguel.  It was the 3rd 5K in the little summer road racing season I put together and I was really excited to see how all of my training was shaping up. The A-goal for the day was to run a post-collegiate PR (which was sub-17:25).

The night before the race we stayed at my aunt and uncle’s house which was super close to where the race was held. It was really nice to be able to wake up and enjoy a cup of coffee and breakfast before heading down to the race about an hour before to warm-up.  My mom hung out with Lavinia while Henri and I jogged our two mile warm-up together. After drills and strides I headed into the corral  The thing that’s very different about road racing than races on the track is that there can be very little regulation on where people line up and they don’t like to let you do strides over the starting line. On Tuesday there were a few little kids trying to elbow their way to the front of the crowd and they had us packed together like sardines for 15 minutes or so before the race. I tried not to stress too much about this but it definitely hard to start running 5:30ish pace after standing around for 15 mins.

When the gun went off a group of high school boys and fast guys took off and I tried to keep them in my sight for as long as I could. The course was a lollipop shape, it ran out along a trail to a lake, looped around the lake and returned to the start/finish line on the same trail. I missed the mile marker (when I race I don’t turn my watch on autolap) so I’m not 100% sure of my first mile split. I had kept a relatively constant space between myself and the main group of guys but as we were looping around the lake I caught up with a high school boy and we went back and forth for the rest of the race. 

I hit the 2nd mile marker at 10:56 and then we started the slight uphill climb back to the finish line. With about 400m to go I passed the kid I had been going back and forth with but then he BLEW by me 50 meters out from the finish and I had nothing left in the tank! Bummed!

I crossed the line in 8th place overall and the 1st female with an official time of 17:21 – a 4 second post-collegiate PR and 14 seconds faster than I’ve run this “season”. I was so so happy with my result – I am officially faster than I was before baby (my previous post-collegiate PR was run a few months before I got pregnant with Lavinia) and I feel like I’m still only at the beginning of this post-baby training/racing deal.

After the race we enjoyed the fun festivities and pancake breakfast. Liv was especially into the post-race bananas that Whole Foods was handing out.

I definitely hope to do this race again as it was really fun and super family friendly. Maybe the next time around Lavinia will even be interested in doing the kids race! 🙂