5K

The Morning Runaround

I’ve taken to running 5K races on island with my friend Lisa, who persuaded me that races would be fun and a good discipline to take up. 5K races, like door prizes, are ubiquitous on island; there’s at least one every weekend, and often several from which to choose. I think people generally choose on the base of the route, how flat or scenic or close to their home it is. Having run a 5K with hills, I can attest to the fact that the flatness of the course really is a consideration.

5k races are so popular, I would guess, because 1) on a tropical island, especially one with a large military presence, people like to be active and/or physically fit, and 2) on an island with relatively poor infrastructure, there’s a real need for organizations to have constant moneymakers. Even with their modest registration fees, 5K races rake in the dough for an number of causes: AIDS, crime prevention, Catholic social services, breast cancer awareness, university clubs, school fundraisers, you name it, and if you don’t, your free t-shirt will do so for you.

The races always begin at 6:00 am, registration and warm-ups at 5:15 or 5:30. This might seem to you like an ungodly hour to be doing anything, especially anything involving any exertion more strenuous than yawning. It is. On the other hand, it would be too hot to run any other time of the day, and one does get the benefit of running to often spectacular sunrises. And people do drag themselves out of bed to run: the biggest race I ran had well over 1000 runners, and on average there’s 200 to 300.

I’ve noticed that there are various types of islanders who race consistently. First, of course, are the extremely buff military guys, with their flattop haircuts and tight t-shirts covering tight muscles. They turn out in force (no pun intended) for races and tend to race fast and well -- all that discipline and civic-mindedness, from which Guam benefits immensely. (Oddly enough, I don’t see many military women running, or perhaps they’re not as identifiable in that they’re not required to have buzzcuts.) Second would be the serious local runners. There are lots of native Guamanians who love to run, and live on an island well suited for it; track and field programs are big in island high schools, in part, I would think, because track and field is a cheap sport to run, comparatively speaking. Third would be the pipsqueak kids from aforementioned local schools and clubs who are as fast as lightning. They show me and Lisa up consistently without even breaking a sweat. Fourth would be the nice church members from one of the Catholic parishes who run as a group and view each race as kind of an outing, not unlike the coffee and donut hour following service. Many of them are older and walk a lot of the course, but they are dedicated and delightful. Fifth would be the perfectly made-up and beautifully coiffed Korean ladies who show up in their totally coordinated running togs and, for some reason, don’t seem to sweat at all. Sixth would be folks like Lisa and me, who just enjoy running and each other’s company.

Lisa and I have noticed that often, while we run, we are the only ones talking. Lisa and I treat a run as a kind of social gathering -- we don’t have lots of time to visit, what with my job and Lisa with her family -- so we chat merrily away while we run, which I am sure cuts our time down, but we don’t care. Everybody else around us seems enormously intent on running and improving their times. Actually, we have always improved our times, too, though this isn’t saying much; we ran out first 5K in about 45 minutes, which means of course that we walked a good chunk of it. Our goal is a 10-minute mile by the end of the year, which, in all honesty, isn’t very fast, but if we can break 30 minutes by the end of 2005, we will be happy. I am down to 36 minutes, Lisa down to about 37. But obviously we are not terribly serious about our progress.

The real runners of course would scoff at us, as well they should. When a course backtracks on itself, we see the runners way out in front of the pack returning toward us, running so grimly and seriously that we feel that it can’t be fun for them at all. (We, on the other hand, are talking merrily; at our first race, we had a really lively discussion about what constitutes good architecture, and this somehow morphed into a lively discussion of our favorite restaurant meals, which in turn made us very hungry.) Real runners can run a 5K in less than 20 minutes, sometimes as fast as 16 or 17 minutes. Occasionally one of the race winners will be an eight-year-old about as tall as my waist, who must run faster than the wind and seem pretty nonchalant about the whole deal. Those of you who run, of course, are aware of the classes in which one runs: junior division, senior division, et cetera, et cetera, and further divided by gender. By virtue of my age, I am classed in what is the “master’s division,” though the only thing that I have seemed to have mastered is to how to follow up a race with a leisurely coffee hour at Hava Java.

All races conclude with door prizes, and awfully good ones at that, which is why everybody stays for the entire drawing process. You would, too, if you could win free airline tickets to Hong Kong. And there is the awarding of ribbons for all the race classes, which I don’t pay attention to a great deal, as I will never actually win one; but I do like to see if my friend Liz’s husband Ken wins one in my division, and he usually does, as he is a serious runner. There is also some kind of food for the racers: bananas, orange slices, yogurt, bottled water, and juice drinks full of electrolytes. Sometimes there are pastries, which everybody gobbles down, sort of defeating the healthy purpose of running in the first place. Finally, everybody gets a t-shirt with the logo of the run on it to show all your friends how virtuous you were, getting up at 4:30 to go run somewhere. I am developing a large collection of these, and you see them on everybody all over the island.

Running is a good sport in that it requires very little in terms of equipment, and there really isn’t a lot to learn. Well, I had better amend that: there may be a great deal to learn, but I haven’t learned it. I just run, as indeed I expect most people who aren’t serious about it do. It seems to me that running magazines (and fitness magazines in general) have that basic editorial problem: there aren’t enough developments in the sport to really warrant a new issue every month. I mean, really -- has running changed all that much since the time of the Greek marathons? Don’t you still put one leg in front of the other and, well, run? Perhaps it has -- there may be all kinds of aerodynamic developments in one’s stride, and runner’s catalogs certainly make a great deal out of the technological breakthrough of running shorts made of that new miracle wicking fabric Speedulon or Dacrodash or Thermozip, but that needn’t concern me. I am only in it for the t-shirt, but I expect you probably knew that already.

Comments

[Amy Anderson]

Well, while you're running the 5K, I'm walking it. They just had the Breast Cancer Race for the Cure this past Saturday. They put all the runners in front of us walkers to, quite literally, give them a running start. It started down by the Fox, went straight up Woodward, turned on Hancock (by your old church), down John R and a right onto Forest (by your old home), and back down Woodward. It started at 9:00, but it probably would have been better if it was at 5:00 considering how steamy it was outside. Alas, we had no door prizes. Just free T-shirts and water.