Today my husband and I ran a trail 10K in Flagstaff, Arizona. I ran the race two years ago, so I was familiar with the course. Last time, I was four minutes off my goal time, given the high altitude (7000 ft), steep hills, and rocky terrain.
Before the race started, my Garmin froze up and wouldn't work. At the starting line, the announcer said there were no clocks or mile markers along the course, so I figured I would listen to my body and see what happened: uncharted territory for my type-A self!
The first mile is slightly downhill and on a packed gravel trail, so it was pretty easy. The big hills are in the second and third miles. After what felt like about 4.5 miles, I asked a volunteer how much further, and he said three miles. I wanted to cry. A little while later, a girl with a functioning Garmin passed me, and I asked her. She said we'd gone about 5 miles (yeah! I was right!) and told me our pace (bad, bad). I typically have a pretty strong kick late in my runs/races, and I think I was able to make up some time between miles 4 and 5.5 (estimates!), but I wasn't able to kick in my characteristic finish line sprint. As I approached the finish line and saw a number I had never seen before in a 10K, I wanted to cry. We drowned our sorrows in excellent Swedish oat pancakes at breakfast, though.
I have read that one can expect performance to suffer by about 10% when running/racing at high altitude. I had wanted to run the race at marathon race pace (8:24 for Boston!). I ended up running about 10% slower than that, so I felt a lot better about my performance after doing that calculation. However, I will have my work cut out for me this training season. I'm hoping that last week was just a bad week and that I'll be back to my easy sub-9:00 pace 5-milers and weekend 9:00 pace 10-milers this week.
I'm also trying to lose some weight. I'm 5'8" and have been at 135 lbs for the last several years but have gained 10 lbs, more or less, over the last eight months. I know the extra weight is affecting my performance, but I also need the calories to run well. Since I've started keeping track of my calories, I find that I eat 1300-1400 calories a day, but I'm not losing weight. Maybe that's too few calories to keep my metabolism going...I'll have to play around with that.
Another week, a fresh start! |