St. Patrick's Day 5K

I'm so glad this race is over. I was really nervous about it. I didn't have a set time goal, I just wanted to do better than last year which was an 8:54 pace. This course is the hard one I described before: track, trail, and gravel/sand road. We've had a lot of rain lately so the washed out ruts on the trail and the potholes on the road were bad. I did a lot of jumping. And as if it wasn't hard enough, there were two hurdles! They didn't get the gate lifted that blocks the trail, so we had to jump it. It wasn't low enough to run over and it was too tall to go under, so we had to come to a complete stop. The weather was cold, 38 degrees, but once I got warmed up I appreciated the coolness. Lastly, they mismeasured and it was actually 3.24 miles.

I finished with an average 8:35 pace. I am very happy with that. I just wanted something to say that I have actually improved in the last 6 months. That I haven't been doing all this for nothing! I finished 8th for women and I couldn't stick around to see the results by age. Nobody pushing a stroller beat me this time (I admit that's just because they had to lift them over the gate) and the 5-yr-old did not beat me (he ran a great race though).

I need to do better with my pacing. I started off too fast (as usual) and I started my final kick too early (I'll blame the mismeasurement for that). I melted 100 yards out and the lady in front of me beat me by about 5 seconds.

Question: there is another 5K in two weeks, and another one 2 weeks after that. Is 2 weeks too soon to race again? I want to race at least one of these. I'm thinking at this short distance it will be OK. The first one is local, but the second one is an evening one with a cool high tech shirt and a great post-party. They're both road races. The first may even be the route I run weekly. After these, I'm concentrating on distance again.