Today was the Spring Valley 5K race which is part of the YRRC Winter Series. It started a little after the scheduled 2 PM start time, but that was fine with me. I met up with Bill H. and was able to get some much needed warm-up time by doing some laps around the park. Then it was time to line up at the (extremely muddy) starting line.
I’d say there were about 120-140 runners there today, under sunny skies and with almost perfect 50 degree weather.
Now, I had been warned that this course had some serious hills, so it’s not like I went into it expecting a flat road. I’m not sure any amount of warnings, however, could have prepared me for what I actually encountered during this race. It started on a downhill, which was nice, but then immediately went up a steep hill. A few more turns and we were heading back down an extremely steep incline… and that was the last of the downhills.
From about 0.8 miles to 2.8 miles, it was basically uphill. Check out the elevation graph (green line in the pace graph below).
By the way, the pace spike at 0.8 was a turn-around cone.
I’m usually pretty decent on hills, but the hills on this course just destroyed me.
According to my Garmin Forerunner, I covered 3.03 miles in 27:22 (9:02/mi pace) with an average speed of 6.6 MPH and a max of 11.5 MPH. My 1-mile splits were 7:53, 9:32, and 9:45, with the last 156 feet at a 5:47/mi pace. Total ascent was around 600-650 feet. Burned about 450 calories.
I’m not sure the splits and average pace really tell the whole picture. At one point around 1.5 mile mark and trying my best to make it up yet another incline, I actually hit a 13:00+ pace. That’s pretty bad. But at least I can say I was still “running” at that point, no matter how slowly I was moving or how badly I wanted to walk.
Not my fastest 5K ever, but I certainly worked harder for this one than at any of my previous races. Definitely enjoyable (after the fact). And of course YRRC did an outstanding job of organizing and timing the race. They always do a really nice job with events.
I’m spent.
It was nice to meet you in person. Those hills were insane, this was definitely the toughest course I’ve raced or trained on. One thing I’ve noticed with the Garmin units is that the elevation data often seems pretty whacky (you can tell the start and finish elevation are off by 20-30 feet). On MotionBased you can enable their ‘gravity’ service to try correcting the elevation data using topographical info. You can apply this on a per-workout basis or as a general preference.
Ditto on meeting you!
Yeah, the one complaint I have about the Forerunner is that the elevation data always seems a bit wonky. But I’m pretty sure that’s more a function of underlying GPS issues than it is a problem or design flaw with the actual device. A simple solution that Garmin uses on the eTrex is to add a barometric altimeter. Probably wouldn’t be a bad addition to the Forerunner too, but it would require frequent recalibration.
Oh well… I’ll check out the gravity stuff on MB. :)