My first official 5km (which I had no business running)

Let me start with the confession, because this journal only works if it’s honest: I had no business running on Saturday.

The week had flattened me. A cold came through on the 3rd and knocked me clean out — throat on fire, blocked nose, the works — and then, as these things do, it settled into my chest, where it set up a nightly coughing routine that still hasn’t quite packed up. By any sensible measure, I should have stayed in bed.

But there was a local 5km on Saturday morning. An actual, organised, pin-a-number-on race. And after the great non-race of September — the one that dissolved into a parkrun and a soccer match — I think some stubborn part of me wanted to just finish an official one. So I got up, and I went.

And I did it. My first proper, organised 5km race. Run-walked, easy, well within myself, no heroics — exactly as a man with a chest cold should run if he insists on running at all. I crossed the line. Number on my chest, result on the board. First official race: done.

Now, the honest part. My time was not going to trouble anyone. The fellow who won came home in around twenty minutes — a different species of runner entirely, running a different sport to the one I’m in. And for a moment I let that bother me, before I remembered the only two things that actually matter.

One: I am not training to be fast. I’m training to still be moving after eighty kilometres next June. Slow and enduring beats fast and finished, every time, in the race I’m actually running.

Two — and this is the real measure — the version of me from June couldn’t run five kilometres at all. He didn’t know what his watch measured. He hadn’t raced in years. That man would not believe that this one got up with a chest full of cold and ran an official race to the finish. I didn’t beat the winner. I beat the only opponent that counts: who I was four months ago.

So: a slightly reckless first race, run on lungs that weren’t ready, finished anyway. I wouldn’t recommend the chest-cold part. But I crossed my first real finish line, and I’ll take it — coughing and all.

(The cough, for the record, is getting a doctor’s attention. Even stubborn men have limits.)