Mississauga 5km race, May 10, 2008

I arrived back in Canada late Thursday, and I thought what better way to shock my body than to run a 5km race. Most major cities in Canada have some sort of "marathon weekend", and this weekend was the Mississauga Marathon. 5km and 10km races were held Saturday evening, and 1/2 marathon and marathon events went off on Sunday morning. Total participation for this race weekend was ~10,000. (The 5km race had 1005 participants).

The 5km course was totally flat. The first 2km was road running, while the last 3km were along a lakeside path. The skies were blue, temperature was 16-18C, and the wind was calm when the race started at 6pm. I wore my black Namban singlet.

I felt like my previous PB of 18:55 would be broken... At 1km I was in 9th, and I could see the first six guys were really solid and I had no chance, but the two guys right in front of me didn't look super great. A tall gangly kid and a 30-something guy running with an i-pod and hat... I wanted to beat them! I passed the kid at 3km, and the other guy at 4km... but he kept hanging onto me and in the last 200m he made a sprint for it, but I held him off and beat him by 0.7 seconds :))

My splits were 3:16, 3:35, 3:41, 3:41, and 3:36 for a time of 17:49 and 7th overall!!

Many thanks to Rie and Yuri for helping me train for sprint finishes!!! ;-)