18:44.86. That was my time for the 5K at McCarren Park.
That was 6:02 per mile. I finished 27th out of 683 runners, 26th out of 355 men, and second in the men's 40–49 age group.
The official result lists North Brooklyn Runners as my team.
Those numbers are the complete public record we have for the race. They are enough for a short account without pretending the morning was a major turning point.
Elitefeats provides both the full race table and an individual result page for bib 693. Those two pages agree on the time, pace, overall place, men's place, age-group place, and team. That makes the result triangulated without relying on memory.
McCarren Park is a local place for me. It sits between Williamsburg and Greenpoint and has been used for running, workouts, and ordinary neighborhood laps for years. Racing there is different from traveling to a national championship or building a season around a marathon. The course is close to home, and many of the runners are part of the same New York running community.
The result also puts me in a new age-group line. At 40, I was scored with men from 40 through 49. I finished second in that group.
The event used a ten-year age range. A later race in South Nyack would use M40–44 instead. Those are different categories, so the places should not be compared as if the fields were identical.
That does not require a story about decline or reinvention. The clock still says 18:44.86. The category says M40–49. Both can stand without an explanation about what turning 40 is supposed to mean.
The race had 683 finishers in the published results. That gives the event enough size to feel busy while still being a neighborhood 5K. A fast start can become crowded quickly. Position matters, but the current source does not provide a start video, splits, or my own description of the course.
The men's field had 355 finishers. I was 26th among them and 27th overall. The one-place difference is part of the official result, not an estimate from the age-group table.
The safe version should not make up tactics. We do not know from the result page whether I went out too hard, ran even splits, passed people late, or spent the final mile chasing the age-group winner.
We know the final pace and place.
The team line matters too. North Brooklyn Runners appears beside the result. Earlier running chapters were tied closely to Prospect Park Track Club. By 2024, this public record placed me with NBR in Brooklyn.
The NBR connection also fits the location. McCarren Park is in North Brooklyn, where the club holds a visible place in the local running community. The result page supports the affiliation. It does not establish which workouts I attended or who coached the race.
That shift should not be turned into a club breakup story. Running communities overlap. People train with friends, join local workouts, race under a team name, and keep relationships across clubs. The result only shows which team I represented that day.
This race also came shortly after a work transition. I had left Wahoo in the spring and began building Goodword in May. Those dates are anchored, but the source packet does not show that startup work caused or changed the 5K result. They happened in the same period. That is all we should claim.
The race should remain a running story unless a calendar, message, or first-person account shows a real link to work. Being busy at a startup and running a local 5K in the same month is chronology, not proof of balance or a productivity method.
The image search should stay local and specific. An event photograph on the McCarren course would be better than a later portrait. The official result page proves the performance, but it does not provide publication rights for a race image.
If no cleared race photograph exists, a simple result graphic or privacy-safe course image would be more accurate than using an unrelated training shot. Any result graphic should cite Elitefeats and avoid copying page design wholesale.
The whole race took less than nineteen minutes.
I ran 18:44.86, represented North Brooklyn Runners, and finished second in my age group.
Then McCarren Park went back to being the neighborhood park.