Race Results: Havelock Charity Run

This morning was the Havelock Charity Run in Lincoln. We ran the 3k version. This event had the extra feature of running as part of a team to earn money for a charity. The way that the charity piece works is that Pinnacle Bank donates $50 to your selected charity. Then if your team beats their team (who is always pretty slow) then they will donate an additional $25, for a grand total of $75. The Charity we chose to run for is the Matt Talbot Kitchen. Their mission is "to serve the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of Lincoln's working poor, and homeless through outreach, advocacy, education and the provision of food and shelter.

Amy's brother puts our team together and had enough people this year for two teams. One of the guys that ran with us was our former high school track and cross country coach. It was nice I'm happy to say that both teams beat the Pinnacle Bank team. The team I was on got second and the other team got 5th. We had all men though and they had two girls, they were the second coed team.

This course is pretty much flat, there was one hill but it wasn't very steep at all. My goal for this race was 13 minutes. I really wanted to make my goal 12, but I didn't think I could pull that off and wanted to keep things realistic. My watch time was 12:03 and I'm pretty sure my chip time will be about the same. So I made my goal of 13 but I'm upset that I didn't run just a little faster and break that 12 minute mark. I'm pretty sure I could have but I didn't know the course and I thought there was another turn before the finish line so I held back a little bit until I realized that I was wrong. I'll need to make sure I get a map of the course sooner and study it better next time.

Amy had a good race too, she ran a 16:37 which is quite an improvement over her two mile time of 19:55 from April 21st.

Next up is a 5k for the Kearney Community Olympics on the 23rd. According to the McMillian Running Calculator my 12:03 translates to a 21:01. So I'm making my goal 21 minutes, but I have a secret goal of breaking 20 minutes.

Training Plan

The next race I'm planning on running is the Havelock Charity Run. My brother-in-law gets a team together for this event every year. I couldn't make it last year but I ran a 13.49 in 2005. I'll post later on what charity we'll be running for. Our team will run in the 3k event and I have about 7 weeks until the race.

I'm not sure what I want to focus on right now, running farther or running faster. I want to run a marathon someday but since I've only been running for a few weeks it will probably be a couple years at least before I do that. So I'm leaning toward running faster and getting some of my speed back so I can post times that I'm a little bit proud of. I'm going to set my goal at 13 minutes. That would be cutting off almost a minute per mile from the pace I ran last race. I think it's achievable though because it is a shorter race and I'll have a lot more miles on my legs.

Since I'm not an expert on running or anything remotely close I did what I do best, search the internet. I found a number of different training schedules and I've decided to go with About.com's beginner 5k program. Since it is an 8 week plan and for a 5k not a 3k I'm going to skip week seven. I decided on this plan over others (someday I might post about them) for a couple of different reasons. This program is pretty simple compared to some of the other plans. I like that they have some speed work involved, most of the other plans were just about adding miles. The miles that it suggests I run seem about right to me, especially since I'm training for a 3k.

I'm going to plan on doing Run 1 on Sundays. I'll do Run 2 on either Mondays or Tuesdays, but Tuesdays are more likely. Run 3 will always be on Wednesday and Run 4 on Saturday mornings.