A Great 10K !!

I ran a 10K race this weekend finishing 3rd in my 50-54 age group!!  Yahoo!  I finished in 51:58 at an 8:23 m/m average pace.   And once again, I was not surprised to note that there are some serious runners out there:   While lining up in the starting area I wind up next to a group of 50-ish guys who were planning on doing a 8:00 m/m pace and offered that I should  join them.  I’d love to be able to run a sustained period of time at an 8:00 m/m pace, but that was not my day to try.  And these guys flew – one, who I later find out is 55+ ran at a blistering 7:02 m/m pace.  He was already enjoying coffee and a bagel by the time I came lumbering in almost 9 minutes later.  How do these guys get so fast?  Are they born that way or did they train to get there?

The really cool part about this 10K is that to me it means that I am just one-more-step closer to realizing the real possibility of achieving a 2 hour target for my upcoming HM and closer to a 4 hour target for my Chicago Marathon.  I found a very cool website (www.mcmillanrunning.com)   with a predictive calculator that is supposed to be realistically accurate (http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm).  Using this site was important because just because I was able to average an 8:23 m/m pace for the 10K, does not translate into being able to do it for 13.1 miles or, tougher yet, for 26.2 miles.

Progress baby, progress.

Little tangent here:  While doing a 6 mile jaunt last week I had an interesting observation:  During my run I found myself debating whether or not I should be even be doing a 6 mile run just before the 10K race. During the 3 to 4 mile segment I had pretty much convinced myself that I should properly rest my legs for the race and that it was ok to stop after 4 miles.  I also noticed that while I debated it, I was beginning to drag and my pace suffered horribly – I went from a 9:00 m/m pace to 10:00.  Ultimately I said screw it, I’m doing the 6 miles cause I want to and I like it, and perhaps not so surprisingly, my pace picked up dramatically. I wound up finishing the last two miles at a nice 8:30 pace.  I think that the moral of the story here is don’t debate with yourself….   I had made a plan, and I should have just stuck to it without debate.

Meanwhile, back to the 10K:  It was a good run and it was aggressive for me.  I had tried to plan my pace keeping in mind some of the hills that we would encounter, and so on.  I typically start easy and try to finish as hard as I can.  As it is, I usually need a mile just to get myself loosened up.  Starting at mile 5 there was this long hill that steadily became steeper   (the 10K was a circuit course that we ran two loops of, so this was the second time we hit it).  Approaching now the second time and with a mile and a bit to go was difficult.  I was tired…  But amazingly, and I don’t where it came from, but as we hit the steeper part of the hill I just dug deep, stayed on my toes, and I just pushed.  I was pretty much done by the time I crested the last part of the hill, but the great, and I do mean great news, is that I bested the other runners that had been running with me, except for this one 17-18 year old kid who could run like a cheetah.  He passed me almost like I was standing still and I never saw him again.  That boy could run.   After a few yards of recovery (where I am sucking oxygen into my body through every possible orifice) I dig deep again and run as hard as I can for the last ½ mile. Overall, including navigating the hills, I managed to average a 7:44 pace for the last 1.2 miles.  That was HUGE for me.

I was thrilled to see that I crossed the finish line, by my watch, at 52:00.  But I was absolutely ecstatic that the chip timer caught me at 51:58 (sub-52:00 !! ). Maybe there is some hope for this old fart!  The next event will be the Dexter-Ann Arbor HM on June 5! I'm hoping to beat the 2hour mark!