I Accidentally Ran a 15k

Well, almost a 15k. This wouldn’t be so bad if I had planned and trained for it; I had originally intended to do a 5k.

My wife’s gym organized a casual weekend run at the Westmoreland Heritage Trail. You could do any length of a run, from a 5k (I think shorter than 5k, too) to a marathon, starting whenever in the morning, and meeting for lunch after. There were quarter mile markers on the trail, too, so you can easily gauge your distance if you paid attention. There was a set starting location with a volunteer table, with water and bananas and what not, so the idea was that we’d run half our distance, then turn around on the trail to go back to the start to finish it off. There were additional stations set up a certain points downtrail. This will be a relevant fact later.

I was using my wife’s old Baloney Exercise Wrist Bracelet (BEWB), since the race didn’t have distance markers and were really supposed to keep track of the distance ourselves. BEWBs, as most of you know, connect to your phone, but the GPS on this BEWB still works without one, presumably. On it, you can set a certain distance to run and it will buzz when you reach it. I set it at the 5k distance, though really I should’ve set it for half that so I’d know when to turn around on the trail.

So I ran, and much sooner than I had anticipated, the BEWB buzzes: I’d already done the 3.11 miles for the 5k. It certainly didn’t feel long enough, and under the assumption the BEWB wasn’t working properly because I hadn’t paired it with my phone, I kept going. I also factored into the equation that the next banana/water station was at the halfway 5k halfway point, so I could just use that landmark as my turn around point.

Well, I had started my run early, so the station wasn’t set up yet, and that meant Jay kept running. I felt unusually tired for a supposed 5k and in dire need of a good Porta-John, so I thought I’d turn around at the next one I came across. I did find one, in an small industrial-type of park, right near a street that I easily use as a landmark to gauge my actual distance afterward on a map. I still didn’t trust the BEWB to be accurate.

But the BEWB was accurate; scarily so. I paid attention on the way back to the quarter mile markers, to ground myself in sanity, and as another measurement tool, alongside the distance map screenshot and linked above.

I usually have a pacing problem to begin with: I tend to run too fast at the start, and in this case I assumed I was only doing a 5k, so I did my normal 5k pace. It was a nice, cool day for running, lots of distractions on the trail with the other runners and cyclists, nice scenery, no elevation changes. When I run, too, it’s usually on a treadmill where I can easily see my distance at a glance. Time and distance are much different when you’re running in place, staring at a wall, than actually traversing through nature.