Hi, we're two guys living in Copenhagen. Marquis Caldwell, 400m runner for Sparta Athletic Club and Frederik Madsen, an entrepreneur and CEO.
This year will be our second annual Housemate 5k. Once again we will race to see who has the fastest 5k of the year.
Last year Frederik won, with a time of 20 min 36 sec. It was a great race time for him especially since neither of us trained much for it. We set a date and hoped for the best. Initially, things went smoothly. We downloaded an app, to help us train and tack our times but somewhere along the way, we got lazy and stopped training. Do you ever feel like not working out on some days? Well we do too. It started with making excuses about why we should skip a day of training and before we knew it, we were missing several days of training at a time. By race day, we were nervous, excited, and surprisingly hopeful we would survive. We rode our bikes to the race as part of our warm-up.
When we arrived at the course, we headed to the check-in and laughed about how little we had trained. We each set the goal to run faster than 22 minutes. Why 22minutes? Not sure why, first we said 25 minutes, and as weeks passed we lowered the time. Soon, we were betting about who would beat who. A gentleman's bet with bragging rights for the year.
As we approached the starting line our excitement grew, especially when we saw the pacers. Frederik lined up with the 4:30 pacer and Marquis with the 4:40 pacer... Bam! The gun went off and so did we! Frederik took off with the pacer, eventually passing him after the first 2km. After that, the race was a blur. We both beat our goal times and Frederik was ecstatic to have beat Marquis. Goes to show how far heart and some friendly competition can take you.
After the race, we enjoyed a lavish breakfast of croissants, mimosas, eggs, and bacon at home. We devoured everything as we patted each other on the back for our valiant efforts and our resolve to overcome the odds. After that we agreed to run the race again the following year and then slept for the next few hours.
That brings us to this year. We'll be running the 5k again with the goal of breaking 20 minutes. Now, to the casual reader this may sound completely doable, given our previous exploits. However, this year is different. Neither of us have been training (again). Marquis spent the last two weeks on his grandmother's couch eating and Frederik has been gallivanting around the world meeting with investors for his company. So, our training journey to a 5km race on October 29th begins now.
