Next Stop: Our House

The last 10K I ran was back in November 2009 with my friend Cat. (I wrote about it here on my other blog.) I didn’t realize how long it had been since I ran a 10K, mostly because I’ve been focusing on longer distances. Since I’m running my half marathon in less than 4 weeks, I thought Saturday’s 10K would be a great idea for training purposes.

It was a nice out and back route that was mostly flat but included some hills. Nothing crazy, just some gradual climbs, but it was enough to feel the burn.

I’m really glad I chose to run this because it proved to me that I really need to work on saving a little more energy for the end of my races. I started to lose my steam during the last 2 miles and it showed. I always start out slow, pick up my time in the middle, and then lose my energy at the end. This time I started out “feeling” like I was running slow, and the middle miles felt much easier (although they were around the same pace.) But as you can see below, miles 5 and 6 were sluggish.This was a real eye opener for me. My goal for the rest of my training is to work on starting out slower and slowly increasing my pace rather than increasing so much in the middle that I lose it at the end.

EDITED TO ADD: Check out this cool video of me crossing the finish line! I’m a little over to the left, and I’m wearing black pants, a white top and the light blue visor (as you can see below) Give it a second or two, I’m not crossing the line until a few seconds in.

According to my Nike+, I ran 6.3 miles in a time of 56:02. I was pretty excited about because that showed that I beat my last 10K time by 28 seconds. However, my splits are a little off since the race was actually 6.2 miles, not 6.3.

Mile 1
8:41
8’41″/mi

Mile 2
17:24
8’44″/mi

Mile 3
26:14
8’49″/mi

Mile 4
34:54
8’41″/mi

Mile 5
43:55
9’01″/mi

Mile 6
53:14
9’19″/mi

When I checked the official time on the website, I saw that I actually ran the race in 55:58. That is a full 32 seconds faster than my last 10K time. I was happy with 28 seconds, but something about breaking that 26 minute mark made me even more excited. Overall it was clocked in at a 9:01 pace per mile, a whole 5 seconds per mile less than the Rockville 10K. Not too shabby.

The girl on the far right with the Pacers shirt on? Yeah, she ran a marathon the next day. Runners are a crazy breed.

Happy Wednesday!