Race Report - 10 Mile

Yesterday was the Tim Kennard 10 Mile race in Salisbury.  The weather forecast was not looking promising...it was supposed to be a major downpour all day.  So as a running club, we unanimously voted not to run in the rain.  Initially we thought downgrading to the 5K would be OK but the more we thought about it, the more we thought a dry run was the best kind of run.  So Colleen went to Salisbury to pick up our race packets and shirts.

Sunday morning we met at PowerHouse, donned our race bibs and got on the treadmills.  Here is a "before" picture.

I am a really bad treadmill runner to begin with.  I hate running on the treadmill...and now I was going to do it for 10 miles?  Really?  It was torture...but I covered the screen so I couldn't stare at the little marker going so slowly around the track and obsess on how much farther I had to run.  Every now and then I would peek at the screen to see where I was but I didn't obsess about it.  I also can't run with an i-pod...I'm just weird like that...so I watched Sports Center and read the transcription of what they were saying. 

I felt pretty good overall.  After about a mile, I cranked up my speed a little bit and was able to maintain that faster speed pretty much the rest of the race.  My treadmill shut off at an hour so I had to reset it and figure out how far I had left to run.  I considered that time my "water stop" so I fueled up, drank some water and walked while trying to get my treadmill programmed correctly to finish the race.  Math was involved in calculating the remaining miles so that made things much more challenging!  I can't do math in the middle of a long run like that.

I started to struggle a little bit at mile 8 so I slowed it down for a mile but then picked it back up when mile 9 started.  The last mile I gradually increased my speed until the last quarter mile when I sprinted for the finish.  I wanted it to be as close to a real race experience as possible and there's no way I would ever just keep my race pace coming into the finish line so I had to sprint.


Now there is a runner's creed that you can't wear the race shirt unless you've earned it.  We paid our race fees and ran 10 miles so we all agreed that we had earned the right to wear the race shirt.  My overall time was 1:34:41 which is a new personal best for me!  It works out to be a 9:28 pace.  It's a great effort for a 10 miler but if I want to break 2 hours for the half, I need to run a 9:09 pace.  Much more work to be done...good thing there's still 8 weeks or so until the half.