Last Minute (for me) Racing Decision

I got some good runs in last week, although I moved some workouts around due to laziness and overall exhaustion from work, but I feel OK with getting three runs in and not four. This week's plan got a bit adjusted last minute, but should come out to four runs, hopefully.

Initially, I had decided to make the Baltimore Running Festival 5K on 10/10 my first race since starting up with running again. However, I had seen advertisements for a race called Freedom's Run, being held just about 15 minutes from my parents' house in West Virginia. It sounded like an awesome race and they are offering a full, half, 10K and 5K. I had hoped to be ready to run a 10K by October, but am pleased that I have adhered to my main goal of taking it slow and adding distance very gradually. I think that has helped me a lot, and I'm about 30-45 seconds faster on all my runs this year than I was last year, which is great.

Anyway, Freedom's Run is being held this upcoming weekend, but I didn't think that I'd be able to do it, which bummed me out since I've yet to run a race in my home state. Plus, you get some serious swag for the race: a technical t-shirt, a water bottle with hand strap, free stuff sack, and a beer mug (for 21+ runners, of course.) Pretty nice for a $25 5K entry fee, right?

As fate would have it, we had a free weekend this weekend (no friends visiting or auditions in NY or mountains of work, etc) so we decided it'd be a nice weekend to head up to WV to see my parents since we are going to be in Cincinnati for Thanksgiving this year. So, Annie and I will get to run the 5K after all, which is awesome.

So, I'll get to test out my training to date on Saturday. Based on the elevation profile of the course, it should be somewhat fast, although the hill at the end is going to be murder. But by then, I'm hoping I'll just not care and will run through the pain.

Tonight, in between watching the first installment (TiVoed, of course) of Ken Burns' documentary on the national parks and reading some investment research for a new company I'm covering, I'll think about a race strategy and decide just how hard I want to run this race. Do I want to aim for a PR, considering how flat much of the course is? Do I want to just run it kinda hard and save up for Baltimore in two weeks? Do I want to treat it like a training run and just enjoy it so I can do a longer run on Sunday?

My initial reaction is that I want to run it hard and try to PR on it because the Baltimore 5K is much hillier. So if that's my overall attack, what is my underlying strategy? So many questions, but nonetheless, I'm excited to be running a race this weekend!