The Silicon Valley Geek

What: 5K walk/run or 10K run.

I ran this race on Thanksgiving day with my son.

This was the third edition of the race. It is getting very popular: 6120 participants this year. Because they allowed race day registration, they could not predict the number of participants. So they ran out of T-shirts.

Who knows? Maybe this will become as popular as Bay-to-Breakers. Several people had Indian feather head bands. My son had a turkey headband strapped to his arm. All we need is an Elvis…

The race started in downtown San Jose at 9am. There was a slight delay before the gun due to SJPD blocking off the roads used for the race.

I found that it was almost as crowded as the Wharf-to-wharf race at Santa Cruz earlier this year. We had to run on the side-walk in order to overtake slow runners/walkers. There was some attempt to segregate slow runners/walkers from the faster runners, but this was not entirely successful. Perhaps this was because non-hardcore participants did not know their minute/mile time.

The nice thing about a small race like this is that you very quickly get to the front of the crowd where only the faster runners are. There is more room to breathe and less of a feeling of claustrophobia or the need to swerve around people.

After running several ½ marathons, you start to appreciate the short distance of a 5K run. By mile 2, you are ready to start sprinting to the finish line. Compare that to a ½ marathon where you would still have 11+ miles to go at that point.

Just after the 2nd mile point, I noticed that my son was slowing down at an uphill. So I pulled up next to him and started singing loudly. His response was an embarrassed “shut up” and he pulled ahead. At least the singing worked. The moment I saw the finish line up ahead, I overtook him and sprinted to a finish time of 23:36. I beat him by almost 7 seconds. Yay!

Interestingly, my pace was the same as my interval training pace. So it looks like interval training top speed translates to a short distance running speed.

We’ve promised to run together again for next year’s Pat’s Run, a 4.2 miler organized by the Pat Tillman Foundation. Maybe he’ll beat me then.