It would not be a race experience for me if the weather did not get in the way. In fact, most of my races over the past 2 years have been in rain or snow!
My 10K slated for April 1st was no different. High winds, ice, and snow were in the forecast.
Since I don’t do this for earnings or for winning, I made the executive decision this time to scrap the race and run a day early.
I care most about individual improvement. How far can I take it?
Moving up a day was well worth it as it would turn out.
Pre brief
Regardless of when my “race” would occur, I had it on the calendar months in advance to test my fitness with a 10K at the end of March/early April.
I completed a 100-day steady build mostly focused on base, with small injections of hard running in the latter half of the build.
As usual, the training was swim/bike/run focused with a careful approach to running. I wanted to be healthy. My intensity was allocated to bike and swim.
I made it on the track for one workout in those 100 days with all of the other hard running coming via treadmill—partially due to the incessant winter weather and partially a ground impact reduction experiment.
Nervous for how I would fair, I took a conservative approach to this track workout, and it was a success. My job was getting myself in the ballpark, and this workout confirmed I was there.
Metrics
I had a rocky start to my unload/taper. My metrics were all over the place for a few days despite feeling quite good. During my 100-day build, HRV guidance had proven to be an important data point for keeping me out of trouble, so these mixed signals had me worried and confused until a mentor shared an article on the impact of taper on HRV.
I was feeling strong and the measurements began to normalize as the race day got closer. My interpretation is that my body needed to adjust to the decreased load.
The race itself
A lot goes through your mind in a solo best effort.
“Did I go out too hard?”
“When will the wheels come off?”
“This is agony!”
I experienced all of these thoughts at some point during the 10K.
The course I chose was a one-mile neighborhood loop nearby to my apartment that I have run workouts on before. If I was cherry-picking the weather, I may as well cherry-pick the course too!
A slight downhill, flat, slight uphill, flat made up the course profile and 6 (and some change) laps were on order. The lapped course was nice for pacing but mentally hard on the last few laps knowing exactly what was coming.
Going through 5km in 16:45 caught me by surprise. It was certainly work, but I was managing. I was still rocking and rolling through km 6 and 7, but km 8 hit right during the slight uphill portion. I was starting to teeter a bit and then the last 2km I was on the pain train. Legs were heavy and tightening by the second.
The pace never fell off, but I had to go to the limit to hang on to sub 34:00. I finished lap 6 and gave it one last hard dig to finish out to 10km, posting a major PR of 33:49, completely tapped. The cooldown jog was a cooldown hobble!
I cannot complain about the time. It was on par with the work I put in and I am proud of it. My expectation was to go to the well and see what happened. No time goal was in mind, just matching training effort with racing effort.
One of the best learning points for me in the past year is that you cannot expect to do something in a competition that you did not train for. In the case of this 10K, I nailed the objective, thus I cannot expect more until I realign my aim for a new objective. Being content is important.
Where from here?
I have 3 main questions to ponder before I get building toward summer racing:
Does 10K success mean anything for my longer distance racing?
What’s the biggest limiter to address these next 10 weeks?
How can I continue to implement what worked in the 100-day build and strip away what didn’t?
I don’t have the answers at the moment, but I am keen to put together a solution.