Friday I went up to Seattle to join with another barefooter named Jon to run the Fremont 5K. This was my first ever official barefoot competition! I am so used to running just for the fun of it that I completely forgot to time myself or to even look at the 'official' time when I came back in! I got my results emailed to me and it turns out my "gun time" was 26:35, or an official pace of 8.5 minutes per mile. My actual start time was some 30-40 seconds behind the gun time, because it takes that long for the crowd to shuffle forward to the beginning line. I figure my actual pace was closer to 8.3 minutes per mile.
This is me coming across the finish line. Thanks to my wife, Diane, for taking my photo! My son who lives in Seattle joined us (shod) and he decided he would run a pace faster than us. Jon and I stayed together for the first mile, but he was pacing himself so he would still be fresh for a 28-mile ultra marathon he was running the next morning! So I found myself looking to set my own happy pace, which was faster than Jon's. I picked up some speed as I fell into my groove and started passing quite a few of the other runners. My time going out was probably around 10 minutes per mile, and my time returning was probably closer to 8.0 minutes or faster. This sounds like one of those awful math tests we used to get: (If Ryan ran 10 minutes per mile for the first 1.3 miles and finished a 3.1 mile course in a total of 26 minutes 35 seconds, how fast was he running the latter part of the course?)My appreciation to Jon and his friends who gave me lots of encouragement the first part of the race. He kept on shouting, "Hey! Isn't that Barefoot Ryan I see? How does he run without any shoes on?" I guess having bare feet wasn't enough of an attention getter!
Since this was just a fun run, I had some fun on the course. For the first 1 1/2 miles they kept runners separated from automobiles by a row of orange cones. The surface near the cones was pretty smooth, so I ran a little "slalom" couse by zig-zagging around the cones. At one point I was leaping over them like a hurdler. All in good fun.
Jon and I posing with our custom-designed "running gear"!See you out there, somewhere!
Ryan
1 comment:
Congratulations on your first 5K barefoot race! Maybe one day I'll try it. Last time I ran barefoot about a month ago I got bad blisters from the hot asphalt. When I started out I felt great but after 1 mile I felt the pain of the hot asphalt. I'm ready to come back and run barefoot.
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