I finished my first 5k race last night, and I look forward to more of ’em.
My official time was 37 minutes 46 seconds. I placed 40th out of 42 in my division (30-34 year old males), 415th out of 496 males, and 866th overall out of 1163 runners. The average male ran 30 minutes 17 seconds, so I’m above average. (ahem) The overall winner did it in 14 minutes 41 seconds, and all but 2 guys did it under an hour. I would like to meet the two guys who took over an hour just to shake their hands for finishing.

You can also slice and dice the results online.

Here’s how the run looked in NikePlus:

I screwed up my iPod settings where you see the first couple of red blips. I was running with a new iPod armband with plastic over the jog wheel, and I couldn’t get my jogging-training podcast back on track.  After that, I had a tough time keeping my pace up.  Lesson learned for next time – cut out the clear plastic, touch the jog wheel directly, and have a full 45 minute playlist set up so I don’t have to screw around with it.
The statistics don’t mean much to me. I hadn’t expected to do as well as I did, and I’d expected to be much more exhausted and pained. I feel good, I’m not sore, and I know I could have pushed myself a lot harder. But why? I’m not doing this to win anything, just to get up off my lazy ass.

I totally understand how these things get addictive. I feel great, and I enjoyed myself. I can see myself running several of these a year just to get the t-shirts.