Today was a good day…especially when it came to seeing how fit I’ve become since late September. I trained for the St. Jude Half Marathon for 13 weeks. I took 0ne week off from running and then continued to run when I could. Then I found 2 races that I was interested in running. One of them the Valentine 10k and the other was the Germantown half marathon.
My training began just after Christmas. I will have had 13 weeks to train. I thought the 10k would give me a feel for my overall fitness.
I started the 10k off too fast…but I did not start far behind the starting line. So I had a good start and looked at my Polar S625X and noticed my pace was 6:35. I had to slow down if I wanted to finish the race! So I slowed my pace to about 8:20. The first mile marker came up about 15 seconds before my watch signaled the first mile. My elapsed time at mile marker one (before the watch) was 7:45.
The run continued to go well through mile 3. After that, we were running through neighborhoods and I couldn’t really gauge how well I was running. The run was definitely getting more difficult. My legs felt great and I had no pain and plenty of strength. My heart was pumping though.
Mile 5 I was pretty wiped but realized I had about a mile and quarter left. Not bad. There was a hill ahead…but mostly downhill on the other side. So I ran pretty fast up the hill and faster down the hill. I had to run fast while I could. At the top of the hill my heartrate was 182 bpm (near my max of 185 bpm). I could feel it…I had to slow down toward the bottom of the hill. There wasn’t much distance left to cover…so I picked up the pace a little and finished with a good spint of 20 yards! My final time was 49:56. That’s good because my goal was sub 50 minutes. Not too shabby after taking a week off to recover from being sick. I believe my pace was 8:04.
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