Sunday was supposed to be my eighth marathon.

But it just wasn’t in the cards for me. This was not my year for running 26.2—I just couldn’t get into the shape I wanted to in time.

My New York City Marathon FOMO was HIGH. Everything marathon was making me tear up this weekend—it’s my favorite day.

So I decided to do something for myself—run a local 5K. A Better World Running runs small races along the beach path. Sometimes it feels like a waste of money to pay to run on the path I run every day, but sometimes it’s also just fun to pin a race bib on and run with a bunch of people. I’ve run a 15K and a 5K (no recap) with them, and for what it is, they put on a good race.

My friend Carolyn and I were texting back and forth about NYCM FOMO, and I managed to rope her into this with me!

The start is about half a mile away from me, so I jogged over to warm up and had a good feeling even warming up. I rolled up at 7:10 to pick up my bib for a 7:20 race—love me a good local race.

When I ran the Manhattan Beach 10K a few weeks ago, I had some Vega Pre-Workout Energizer (my digestive system does not tolerate coffee before running) and used my inhaler (my lungs don’t love LA air, especially during fire season), and I felt really strong, so I did the same before this race. (That part was more for me than you, to remember.)

We hadn’t talked about it, but I hoped Carolyn and I would run together. I’m physically getting stronger, and I’m mentally getting so much stronger in the rest of my life, but I’m still kind of struggling mentally with running. I’m less likely to want to stop if I’m running with someone else.

But Carolyn and I started together and ran the whole thing together! The race route is simple—it just goes 1.5 miles up the beach path and turns around. The first mile felt great. We talked intermittently—the pace wasn’t super easy for either of us, but it was still OK enough to talk sometimes.

It felt interminable to get to the turnaround mark, but I still felt strong physically, just a little bored. But before I knew it, we were turning around WOO HOO.

The downside to a race running on the path you’re on every day is that you know exactly how long it is to the finish, and I was just waiting to run south past the pier to know we were almost done. We were just north of the pier when I realized I hadn’t looked at my watch once—and didn’t WANT to. I knew I was running faster than I usually did and I didn’t want to psyche myself out. I said this to Carolyn and she agreed.

I hate the new Activity app in iOS 13, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to look back to see the splits from a few days ago, but we finished in 28:59, a 9:20 pace. I’m a long way from where I used to be, for sure, but I’m feeling stronger and that’s what’s important to me right now.