Ah the 5km distance. I’ve had a weird relationship with it over my 23 years of running. I ran my first 5k pretty late. I was in college and joined the university’s running club (I wasn’t fast enough for cross country, and actually that program was cut altogether my freshman year).
Anyway, by the time I toed the start line of that first 5k, I had already completed several half marathons (the first one at age 13). At the time I felt like 13.1 was my distance. It was all I knew. So training for this 3.1 mile run seemed like training for a warmup run. How do you even approach this?
If you run them for fun, 5ks are a great way to be active on a Saturday morning, get a free banana and maybe even a beer before enjoying the rest of your weekend.
If you race them, it’s another story. The 5k can feel like an all-out sprint. My heart rate goes up just thinking about it. The first mile is fast because you have the adrenaline of the start line. The second mile you hang on because you’re ashamed to fade too much after starting out too fast. And the final mile you get pulled in to the finish line, making those final calculations in your head as you count down the distance left – 1/2 mile, 1/4 mile . . .
Crossing the finish line you feel like you could puke. Or at least that’s how you should feel if it went well.
My go-to goal for a hard 5k effort these days is 20 minutes. It’s a nice, round number and never feels easy for me. It falls right in that sweet spot of achievable but still something I can be proud of once I complete it.
But it’s been close to two years since I tried this. Do I still have this speed? I certainly feel like I do. But I was curious to really see. So I set out to see how well I could do against this random 20 minute goal. Here’s the result:
And because I didn’t capture my watch at the finish in the video, here’s the official Strava proof of my splits. Cheers!