10 Miler Goes Well
I ran in the 12th Annual Army Birthday 10-miler as a chance to get some mileage in and see if I could get close to my current half-marathon pace goal, which is 1:35:00, 7:15 min/mile. The race started early, which was great but I really wasn’t as prepared as I would have liked to have been. I’d only run 1 other race this distance or more and I had been doing 4-5 mile runs as preparation, which is much less than I was doing before the heat wave came to town.
There were nearly 1,000 people for the run and they had us line up at markers with pace times. I went to the 7:45/min pace marker and found myself somewhere near the first 250 or so runners. At the gun, I was amazed by how many people sprinted out of the gate and as usual they drug me with them.
I hit the first mile at about 6:50 and started to panic, so I slowed down. I couldn’t believe I had run that fast for the first mile, but at the time I didn’t feel bad or winded, so I only slowed down a bit. I started to settle into a nice 7:15 pace and was happy to see the course was pretty flat.
As I neared the turn-around point, I started feeling a little dehydrated and my legs were aching. I used a water station to pour some water over my head and used the mental high of knowing I was halfway through to turn it up a notch. I could feel the humidity getting to me as I neared mile 7 and noticed my pace was slowing to 7:40 or so, but I couldn’t seem to pick it up. I hit the finish at 1:17:04 chip time and felt very much out of gas. Overall, I finished 133rd out of about 900, so I accomplished my usual goal of finishing in the top 25%, but I was disappointed I couldn’t do more than a 7:42 pace. I realize I have got to put in more mileage and speed work. I don’t have any races planned for the next few weeks, so I will take this time to get plenty of training in.
