What are we talking about today?

I'll get back to theme days once I find a groove of posting regularly. In the meantime, most of my posts are about some variation of books, bikes, buses, or Broadway. Plus bits about writing, nonprofits, and grief from time to time.

This blog is mostly lighthearted and pretty silly. It's not about the terrible things happening in the world, but please know that I'm not ignoring those things. I just generally don't write about them here.

13 September 2009

Best. 10K. Ever.

I've been chasing a new 10K PR for six months. Last week, I had a fantastic 6-mile tempo run, so I had confidence that I could see that new PR yesterday.

So, I tried a couple of new things: 1. I wore a watch. 2. I had a plan.

Who knew that would work? Yeah, I know, every other runner on the planet.

Here's something that didn't change today: I went out too fast. Yep, my plan for mile 1 was to run it in 10:10. I looked at my watch at the 1-mile mark, saw 9:46, and said, "Oops."

Too late for fussing now; I had 5.2 miles to go. So, I slowed it down a bit, and hit the 2-mile mark in 20:09. I thought, "Perfect! But now I have to find a pace between those two."

I guess I found it; I don't remember my splits from there on out, but I turned around at 31:40ish, which meant I would have to run a negative split by a minute or two, as planned. So I was pretty much on track.

I saw Chad on the way back; he was a few minutes behind me and looking good!

I used mile 5 as a "recovery" mile-- went a bit slower than my overall planned pace so that I would be ready to lay it all out for mile 6. And that bit of the plan worked perfectly. I caught up to a couple of people who I had been trailing for the entire race, and hit the 6-mile point at just over one hour. Perfect!

It took less than two minutes to get from there to the finish, and my final time was 1:02:15-- a new PR by 42 seconds. Holy cow. (My "official" time is 1:02:20-- but they had some clock issues, so I think I may have been cheated out of a couple of seconds & it should have been more like 1:02:17.)

I don't think I can cut 42 seconds off every time, but I would be delighted to get the last 15 seconds off to get down to 1:02:00. From there, I can work on my ultimate goal to be under an hour. In the meantime, I'm going to train extra-hard to get in a sub-30-minute 5K before the end of the year.

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