PBs, Always Satisfying

Yesterday I ran in the O'Hagans 5K, which I believe I've mentioned in previous posts, and happily managed to maintain my previous record of PBing the 5K every time I run one. My 5K PB record has progressed as follows:
Nov: 22:30 (training run)
Dec: 21:43 (training)
Jan: 21:00 (first 5km race, bit of a hill)
Feb: 20:57 (same race as previous, eased off on the final hill to keep heart rate down = error)
later in Feb: 20:05 (O'Hagans, flat course, possibly up to 30 seconds short)
Mar: 19:51 (O'Hagans)
Apr: 19:27 (yesterday)

I was amazed at how much I was able to pull off my last time. Although the previous two 5Ks I'd run had been during low-volume/recovery weeks in my program, I'm now fully in taper mode so perhaps that helped; it was also my first race in my new, feels-so-light-and-fast Kinvaras.

I suspect the biggest difference is actually the reason why I've been racing as often as I can, which is just getting better at executing a race. I felt like throughout this one I was able to stay focused and as a result not allow myself to ease off in the later half of the race when the discomfort levels are getting steadily harder to ignore. My average heart rate from the race was 171, and max 183 - both of these are the highest I can remember having seen (I have suspected for a long time that I'm a low max HR person).

I had a nice little sprint finish too, I'd been slowly closing in on a guy who'd overtaken me about 1km in to the run, and managed to really put the hammer down over the last 100m to close the ~5-10m gap and just edge him out. I was beaten by a friend of mine from uni who has been doing the series barefoot! He's made rapid progress over the last month or so since he first entered, I think his times have dropped from mid 20's to high 18's. I followed him quite closely for most of the way to the turnaround, but when we hit a section where there was grass he could run on rather than pavement, he absolutely flew and left me for dead.

Song of the Day
As promised, here's the obligatory song to accompany my post. It's another NZ band - this one is a now defunct group called Push Push. The song is nearly 20 years old, with a 80's hair-metal type of sound. I hadn't heard this in a long time but it appeared on a music channel on TV recently and I was reminded of its greatness. The song is called Song 27, I'm going to embed two versions, the longer one with no video has much better audio, but I thought I'd include the version w/ video too since it's not the same without video. Enjoy!