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\u2019t 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\u2019ve run ten miles in recent months, I hadn\u2019t done so in a way where I was fine-tuning for a race. However, I realized I hadn\u2019t raced anything longer than a 10K since 2005 yet I\u2019m signed up for a marathon this fall. This was an opportunity to do a longer race in \u201clive\u201d conditions.
Once I was signed up, I set my time expectations in a range from the low seventies, since that\u2019s what I\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve written in prior posts that sometimes you reach a point in a race or a training run when you\u2019re right on the edge of a time goal and where everything around you is blotted out and you\u2019re only focused on the clock, where you distinctly feel a singular part of your body as you\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve done this in training it\u2019s difficult to make that a priority in a race. I wonder whether I could have run as relaxed if I\u2019d stayed focused on sub-seventy during those three miles. Whether relaxing helped is hard to say but it clearly didn\u2019t set me back, and I\u2019ll 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\u2019d tried to go with my current target pace of 7:15 is impossible to say, but for now I\u2019m keeping that goal there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t feel like I was prepared for any of the … <\/p>\n