On Sunday morning I ran my first ever 10km race. This course did a loop around the City Botanic Gardens then headed out via the bikepath under the Expressway and parallel to Coronation Drive until the turnaround point at the Park Rd ramp.
At some stage, all parts of this course have been part of my training program: my short run often follows those paths along from the Gardens until either the Queen St or Ann St ramps, and my 12 km run goes from the Ann St ramp along the Coro Drive path. So perhaps that's why I didn't particularly seem all that excited about the course (although it's a lot easier to run it properly when there are other people around). Maybe it's just that I prefer to run on the other side of the river... Each to their own :)
My right knee had still been feeling a little twingy last week so I started slowly(ish) but found myself back into the pattern of staying with then passing people near me. By around the 3km mark (when the field had spread out) I found myself running with the same handful of people. The four or five of us alternated places for around the the next six kilometres - I think it was at around about the 4.5 kilometre mark that we were passed by the race leader running in the reverse direction (after the turnaround). For a while around about the 7 kilometre mark I had to continually tell myself that I wasn't allowed to stop and walk because tired (which I was) is not the same as in pain (which I wasn't).
At the marker signalling one kilometre to the end I increased by pace a little and didn't notice any of them follow so I focused on the person about 50 metres in front of me. When I caught up with her we both tried to out-pace each other over the next 400 metres or so, but after rounding one of the last corners (a few hundred metres from the end) she too slowed a little. I attempted to catch the next person in front of me, but didn't quite manage it before the finish line. I saw the clock counting down towards 52 minutes as I ran the last 50 metres but wasn't looking at the clock to see my time.
Official time was 51.57.18, and I placed 52nd overall (out of 285) and 16th in my age category (out of 70).
In hindsight I don't think I was quite in the mental space I needed to be in for the run - maybe it was that I didn't really know where the course was until just before the race. Or maybe it was just one of those days. In any case, I did still manage to run faster overall per kilometre than my B2B performance (which is a good thing) and finished well under by "realistic" goal of 55 minutes (despite being slower than by "ideal" goal of 50 minutes - oh well, something to aim for next year).
