Super Sunday Fun Run B-Race

As you know if you read 2026 Fitness Goals, I'm training for a Half Marathon in April, the "Platte River Half Marathon". 

I'm following Runna's Half Marathon plan, and one of the options in the Runna app is including "B-Races" as part of the plan. 

In case you're unfamiliar, a "B‑Race" is a race you do during training to help you prepare for your main race, which is called your "A‑Race". 

Fairly obvious if you think about it in context, but it was not a term I knew about until I started with Runna.

Coincidently, there was a 5k Race planned that starts and ends at the same spot as my "Platte River Half Marathon" that took place last Sunday.

Super Sunday Fun Run

So, I decided to throw it into the plan and ran it Sunday.

I've actually never run an organized "race" of any kind, so this was completely a new experience for me. 

Runna's AI "Coach" told me to "treat this as a hard training run to push towards your A-race. Working harder over a 5km will help you practice your pacing ahead of your A-race. Start off controlled and look to build progressive effort is the way to go."

It gave me a target of 10 - 10:35 minutes per mile pace.

Most races like this (at least the two that I've read up on) have "waves" of runners starting off. The faster runners go first, followed by the next fastest, and so forth. Last go the people who are mostly just walking.

I placed myself in the 10 to 11 minutes per mile wave, and I planned to maintain that 10 to 11 minute pace.

This is faster than my training runs have been, but wouldn't result in any kind of PR (Personal Record). 

Once I started, though, I guess my competitive spirit kept me going a touch faster in order to get ahead of the people around me, and by the time I had gone my first 3/4 of a mile, I had made the decision to push towards my 5km PR.

And, I was very successful at maintaining a fast-for-me pace. 

According to Strava, my first mile was 9:12. My second mile was 9:07. My third mile was 9:08. 

My official "Chip Time" was 28:06.1, which is a 9:04 pace. So, my official time was a little faster than my Garmin / Strava GPS time.

Either way, it is by far my best 5k run ever.

Actually, the Garmin originally had me only finishing 3.08 miles, which is .02 miles short of 5k, so at first I thought Strava wouldn't give me credit for the 5k PR, but the "Adjust Distance" button in Strava gave me an extra .03 miles, so now I have new PR's in

• half mile: 04:22 ... 8:44 / mile
• 1 km: 05:28 ... 08:48 / mile
• 1 mile: 08:49 ... 08:49 / mile
• 2 mile: 17:55 ... 08:57 / mile
• 5 km: 28:08 ... 9:03 / mile

So, I did better than planned ... by a lot.

And ... I've actually been fighting a bit of a cold for the past few days, which certainly didn't help my effort.

I think I did as well as I can realistically expect given my current running level.

Even so, I finished the race 111 out of 316, and only 7th out of 15 in my age group. Not great when I compare myself to "the field", but I guess it isn't about that right now. Still plenty of room to improve.

The "Platte River Half Marathon" is still a couple months away, but I'm feeling good about my training progress so far.

At this point, I don't have another B-Race scheduled, but I might try to get a 10k race in before the final A-Race. We'll have to see what I am able to find.

In the meantime, I need to get over this cold, and I now have a hamstring "niggle" I'm hoping doesn't get worse.

Youtube Video of my Finish

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