Google Turkey Trot 5K report

Rickshaw · Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:25 pm

For the past six months or so I've been working as a consultant at Google, and yesterday the company sponsored a 5K race for employees. I'd been looking forward to this race for a while, as a way to check my fitness improvements and also to test myself against some coworkers. It was also fun to do a race in the middle of a day on Wednesday, instead of the usual weekend morning race time. My best 5K time is 20:26, but I'm not in that kind of shape now. My two recent 5K's were run in 22:02 and 22:10, so with the miles I've logged since then, I was hoping for something maybe mid 21's at the Turkey Trot. I also expected a pretty small crowd of maybe a few dozen runners, and hoped I might place near the top somewhere.

It was a hot day for November, high 70s and sunny. About 90 people showed up for the race, which was unexpectedly high. From the start, everybody burst out and I quickly found myself way back in the middle of the pack. I picked it up to try to work my way towards the front, but everyone was flying. I came to the quarter mile mark in 1:33, a 6:12 mile pace and way too fast. I was already hurting. Somehow there were about a million people ahead of me.

Most of the course was pretty hilly, involving three laps up and around a good sized hill. It was hard to stick with any kind of consistent pace. I kept getting passed and then repassing the same people. I was definitely suffering from having started out too hard, and the hills weren't helping either. I finished the first mile in 6:50, which was definitely too fast given the hills. I alternately surged and faded for the remaining miles before finally making it to the finish in 22:27.

So that wasn't a great race. I finished 18th of 59, which was worse than I'd expected. It seemed like an unusually strong field: 10 out of 59 men finished under 21 minutes on a pretty hilly course, which I'd say equates to sub-20 or better for a flat 5K. The median finish time was about 24 minutes.

Back to training for me...