After the recent cross bike focus, my Z1 running is still a little slower than it was in summer. So going into this 10k the pacing guideline was to start of with a 6-6:05min/mile and than afterwards run best effort. This was slower than my half marathon PR and slower than my previous 10k best. Therefore I wasn’t that excited, but not every race can be a PR. But my coach said, it might be that I am in better shape than my numbers indicate and I can go faster after all it is best effort from mile 2 on.
It was really cold that morning with a few degree below freezing. Despite that I tried to experiment with less clothing for once. I decided to run in shorts, a long sleeve shirt with my QT2 singlet on top plus gloves and hat. But no jacket. I was cold and my finger were super cold at the start and I wondered if I made the wrong decision, but I told myself that it is the middle of the season and if I wanted to experiment with racing cold that would be a good time. As it turns out it was perfect, a few minutes into the race and it felt like the perfect temperature.
I talked with the few people around me, some of the teenagers were aiming for 35min time while some others were going for a sub 37min which I liked. I positioned myself in the second row.
When the gun went off about 10 younger runners took of and quickly had a lead on me and everyone else. I let them go and jokingly said to a guy next to me, we shall see how many of them we will overtake. Even though I didn’t want to start too fast, I knew I was running well below a 6 min/mile. We ran past the one mile mark with 5:49, “only” 10 seconds too fast. Even though it was faster than planned I wasn’t worried. I was focusing on the task at hand. By the first time the initial shuffling for position has stopped. There was a guy who over took me 3 times in the first mile to finally realize that he can’t keep up. Would love to know what place he finished 🙂
I ended up running with another guy and we both had the same goal a sub 37min 10k. I ran next to him for a while till I noticed that he also was running consistently and we had a slight head wind. So I fell back and ran behind him. For the next 2.5 miles into the wind I was following him. It wasn’t a strong wind, but it was noticeable that there was a wind. At first I thought it was easy to follow this guy. But it quickly got hard and at mile 3 I noticed myself falling slowly back and I had to make a conscious effort to catch up with him and stay on him. I was thinking to myself what was limiting me if it mas my legs or the cardiovascular system and to my surprise it felt like both. I just felt I like I didn’t have another gear.
We ran together till mile 4. That is where I decided to start to push the pace. I ran along side the other person but wasn’t able to overtake him since he matched my pace. We ran together for almost a mile till I finally was ahead and started slowly to pull away. On the last mile I wanted to improve my pace but I had the hardest time to actually get faster. I looked at my watch and it said something around 30min and the only thing I was thinking was that his meant less than 7min of suffering. I wanted to check my watch again a little later but forced myself to run to the next bush till I would check my watch again. This almost became like a game of wanting to check my watch constantly, but trying to hold off as long as possible. This kept me busy until I reached the 6 mile marker. After that there was one left turn onto the finish line where the 5k people still were finishing. I overtook a guy who obviously was doing the 5k. He saw it as a challenge and sprinted past me. But I was so tired that I didn’t care and let him “win”.
I crossed the finish line in 7th with 36:32, which is a new 10k PR for me (by 17 seconds). I ended up winning my age group and received another nice plaque to my collection.
During the 10K I overtook 3 teenager from the initial front group. They all reminded me of my early running days when I would start out way to fast and then fall apart. It is amazing what a difference a proper pacing strategy can make.
For once I don’t have HR data since my hear rate monitor was slipping down and after fussing with it 5 times in the first mile I just gave up and let it slide down.
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