I did my very first 10K race today. Prior to this, the only other race I have even run was a 5K on Nov 5 last year.

Would you believe that my biggest worry prior to the race was finding somewhere to park and being worried about roads being blocked off in downtown Ft. Worth. This turned out to be a non-issue. While roads were in fact blocked off, it didn’t affect me at all.

I got to the race area about 75 mins before the start of the race. It was dark, windy, wet, and bit chilly, but I managed to stay warm by hanging around the expo tent.

For the last couple days I’ve been thinking about what pace I should try and run the race in. I set a goal of breaking 1 hour so I figured I’d start at around my normal training pace of about 10min/mile and see how I feel, probably going to 9:00-9:30 for miles 2 and 3 and if I feel fine, pick up the pace a bit.

I started off on plan, but I have a very hard time keeping pace. Eventually I saw a woman that seemed to be running about the same pace I was going at and she seemed pretty consistent so I decided to sit just behind her and I stayed there until about mile 4.5. The course was surprisingly hilly. After going down the first hill just around mile 1, the only thing in the back of my mind is that I need to eventually run up a corresponding hill since the finish is about about 2 blocks from where we started. At one point of the course, we were going up and down over and over. This was especially tough for me since I don’t train on any hills at all. All my training miles have been on flat roads.

Around mile 5, I was starting to struggle, but I held on…just barely. It didn’t help that at that same time, we had an uphill hill to run.

Once I got past that hill, I was within 0.25 miles of the finish so I picked up the pace and passed several people. I even pushed and managed to pass another run about 1 foot from the finish. Once I was done, I came extremely close to throwing up. Coincidental as I was walking around and I saw the finish area of the 5K race, I saw one guy actually vomiting.

My eventual chip time was 1:00:50. I didn’t manage to break an hour. My overall pace was 9:49 min/mile which is basically what I run in training. I’m actually very disappointed in myself. My 5K time from 3.5 months ago was 30:11 so my 10K time isn’t actually any kind of improvement, despite the fact that I have so many more miles under my belt since my 5K race, including 30+ mile weeks for the last 6 weeks plus I’m 10lbs lighter!
Some lessons learned and things I need to work on include:

• I need to do some hill training
• I need to find a way to learn proper pacing. With proper pacing and time awareness, I could have certainly run each mile 10 seconds faster and finished within the hour.
• I need to figure out how much I can push myself earlier in the race. I ran the entire race at my training pace. I wasn’t breathing hard and could have probably carried on a conversation, but I’m afraid of running too fast early on in case I can’t finish.
• I need to figure out why I can race faster than I train.

I’ve been running consistently for 6 months now and doubts are starting to creep in to my mind as to whether I can actually be ready for a marathon in Dec!

Posted by derek in Races