I woke up this morning and found a free entry for the Smithfield turkey trot so I thought I might as well go for it even though I wasn't initially planning on running it. The 5k runners started about 40-50 meters behind the 10k runners whick was annoying because within the first 30 seconds of the race I had quite a bit of people to pass. I got in the gutter of the road and tried to get past as many 10k'ers as possible. I found another 5k runner weaving through the crowd of runners in front of us. Luckily, for me, he tried to go to the outside of all the runners around a turn then tried to weave through the rest. Once we got through the crowd I decided to stick with him, we caught up to the front 10k pack a few minutes into the race then slowly passed them. By the time the 10k and 5k courses split we had a good 100m lead from the pack. I felt unusually tired by the end of the first mile (probably from my nerves), the other runner I was running with was running almost exactly my tempo pace (uphill) so I just decided to stick with him. Once the second mile and the uphill running ended I decided to pick up the pace, fortunately the runner that I was with before had become tired and that was when I knew I had the race. Overall I felt pretty good, I didn't do a good job of handling my nerves but I will have other chances at that before track. My splits were 5:51, 6:01, 5:28 and 10 seconds for the last three hundreths of a mile (sadly it wasn't a full 5k).
2.5 warm with 2, 1 minute intervals at 5k pace, and 2.5 cool.
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