Decision whiplash…

I was toying with the idea of entering a race this past Sunday and there were three distance possibilities: 10-mile, 10K, or 5K. Without going into too much detail, I initially considered the 10K then veered to the 5K. The week before the race I didn’t feel like I was prepared for any of the distances and decided to bag the whole thing. Last Friday, I signed up for the 10-mile.

Oddly, it was my lack of preparation that led me to choose the 10-mile. While I’ve run ten miles in recent months, I hadn’t done so in a way where I was fine-tuning for a race. However, I realized I hadn’t raced anything longer than a 10K since 2005 yet I’m signed up for a marathon this fall. This was an opportunity to do a longer race in “live” conditions.

Once I was signed up, I set my time expectations in a range from the low seventies, since that’s what I’d hit on a recent run, to high sixties. The course was net uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back. I mentally figured 36 minutes for the first five and just under 34 for the second half. It was a bit aggressive for miles six through ten but I also didn’t want to fall apart by going too fast on the first half.

I got to the turnaround at mile five in 35:54 and was on pace. However, based on how I was feeling at mile six, I sensed I wasn’t going to make it to the finish in under seventy. I relaxed to preserve energy figuring I’d likely be in the 72-minute range. Then I reached mile nine at 63:18, realized I was within striking distance of sub-seventy, and knew I had to go for it. I’ve written in prior posts that sometimes you reach a point in a race or a training run when you’re right on the edge of a time goal and where everything around you is blotted out and you’re only focused on the clock, where you distinctly feel a singular part of your body as you’re moving towards the finish. This fell squarely in that category.

69:45 was the final time and there were a couple of other lessons remembered and learned, as well. I mentioned in a prior post that I’d slightly backed off on small, short rises in a 5K time trial I did this past spring, as opposed to charging up them. I felt better at the end of that 5K and had a decent time, and I used this same strategy during the ten-miler. Though I don’t have another ten-mile race to compare this one with, I have to believe that this strategy does allow me to have a stronger finish.

When I thought sub-seventy was out the window and focused on relaxing my posture, while I’ve done this in training it’s difficult to make that a priority in a race. I wonder whether I could have run as relaxed if I’d stayed focused on sub-seventy during those three miles. Whether relaxing helped is hard to say but it clearly didn’t set me back, and I’ll continue to work on that as it may be a way to still run well but not lose energy due to tension.

It’s fourteen weeks until the marathon and a long way to go. How I would have felt at the end if I’d tried to go with my current target pace of 7:15 is impossible to say, but for now I’m keeping that goal there.