I ran the anchor leg of a local triathlon today... kind of a weird, but very fun experience. It's been a long, long time since I ran a 10k, so I was hoping to get a good gauge of where I'm at fitness-wise, since most of my recent workouts have been odd-ball high school XC type workouts.
My teammates told me I'd get the hand-off about 4 minutes down on the top team, and their guy is a 38-ish 10k runner. Piece of cake, I thought, figuring I should be able to run 33:00. But when our biker was nowhere in sight 3:30 down, then 4:00, then 4:30, I started to think a win was out of the question. He finally came into view at 5:00 and I had the timing chip by 5:30 behind the lead guy, running in 3rd place by this point. The weather was perfect, the course was flat with generally gentle turns, and I was initially shooting for a 5:20 pace average, although now thinking that 5:15 might be needed to win.
I had borrowed a Garmin and was banking on being able to pace off of it but should have known the instantaneous pace would be inaccurate. It was bouncing between 5:10 and 5:25 for the first mile, jumping to 6:00 every time I went under a tree (is that normal?), so I really had no clue what I was running. The first mile cone came through in 5:41 and was obviously off... the watch told me I'd done 1.10 miles at that point. So I tried to guess where 5:20 pace was and glanced at the watch every time I was out from under the trees. The 2-mile cone went by in 11:04 and I didn't catch the Garmin measurement. 3-mile cone came and went in 16:31 and I reached the turnaround in 17:08. It was an out-and-back course so I was able to measure 2:20 between me and 1st place, and the excitement of closing so much distance in the first half helped shake off some of the fatigue that was creeping in. I passed 2nd place around mile 4 (22:04, I think?), realized I had a lot left in the tank and started to push it. I peeked at the Garmin every time I was in the clear and watched it drop from 5:20 to 4:58. I was getting nervous as I neared mile 5, straining to see ahead to my target... and he finally came into view around the mile mark (27:12). He was 30 seconds up and I knew he was toast. I dug down a little more, not wanting to make it too close, Garmin pace creeped down to 4:53 (probably just under 5:00 in reality), and he was coming back to me very quickly. I caught him at 5.4 and had a straight shot to the finish. I held my pace to 6 miles, and the final bit was a moderate uphill to the finish. My watch stopped at 33:30 for 6.30, about 45 seconds up on 2nd place. I believe that makes 32:58 for a straight conversion to 6.2, which is okay. That's about where I expected to be.
I was not happy with the mile measurements... In retrospect I had no clue what pace I was running. I believed my Garmin when I was in the open during the race, but in reality it was reading 5 seconds fast or so. It's really not hard to certify a course, so why is it so hard to find one around here? The good news is I had lots left at the end. I believe my last 2.3 miles was run in 5:00-5:05 pace, so I should be running my 10k considerable quicker. I'll have to find a certified course for the next one of these I do.
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