The Ten 5k Challenge, Race #5 Recap (Beaver Lake Run)

This past Sunday I ran the 10th annual Upstate Chiropractic Beaver Lake 5k Run.

Beaver Lake Nature Center is a beautiful state park about 20 minutes west of where I live. Our family goes there every year the weekend after Labor Day for their Annual "Golden Harvest" Festival. They have a lot of smaller trails around this lake that are nice for nature walks. This race was once around a 3 mile loop that encircles the entire lake, with a little bit of extra distance tacked on at the beginning to make it a 5k.

I looked at last year's times and noticed that the winner of this 5k last year finished in just under 18 minutes. This is about two minutes slower than most of the other races I've run, and so I expected my finish time to be a bit slower than my practice runs.

The weather was overcast, a little muggy but mostly a nice day for running. I felt good going in, my back was still a bit tight but nothing serious.

After the race started the runners spread out into a thin line. There were about 120 runners, or so I estimated, and I fairly early on found my pace. I thought maybe I ran a little hard out of the box as I got tired early, like 6-7 minutes in, and dialed it back a bit.

I passed a few people in the first mile and then found myself alone in the woods, running, like Rudy from the movie "Meatballs." It was nice, actually. The trails were narrow and soft and often broken up by wooden plank-style boardwalks through the swampier parts of the trail.

No water breaks and no mile markers made it tough for me to know how I was doing, so I tried just to keep a steady pace. By the 20-22 minute mark I was getting caught and passed by a runner or two. I did my best to not let it affect my pace, but by the 22 minute mark or so I was gassed.

I hit the home stretch and saw that I was just crossing the 25 minute mark, as I could see the timers' clock from the clearing once I hit the end of the trail. I got caught by one last runner, an older gent with grayish hair, before crossing the finish line at 25:20. I finished 32nd out of 115 runners. My slowest race time of the year, two seconds slower than my first 5k in April.

Many of the other folks were saying the same thing after the race, that they were 1-2 minutes off their usual running pace. I suspect that the race is longer than 5k as I run that exact distance enough to know when I'm extending beyond it. Plus, the soft trails don't give you that same spring that pavement does. Anyway, it was a fun race and I'm looking forward to my next one, a week from Sunday, as it's a return to downtown Syracuse and good old street racing.