Sunday was an absolutely gorgeous day for running.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the temperature was somewhere between 15-20C.  The lake had that beautiful summer shimmer, and winds were light.

One of my goals for this year is to get my 10K time down to 45 minutes.  I’m not expecting to get there yet, especially since I’m still only five weeks removed from my first Marathon.  I have about two weeks of running at a faster pace under my belt, which isn’t enough conditioning to run 10K at the 4:30/km pace I would need to run. 

I felt that if I ran hard, I could average a 4:45/km pace and finish in 47:30.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to run a flat pace, negative split, or just go out hard and see what happened.  As the race began, I just ran hard and hoped for the best.  I ran the first 3.5 km at a pace around 4:30/km, but I was getting really hot and my heart rate was climbing too high. I decided that there was no way I was going to finish 10 km at that pace, so I found someone to run with and aimed for something closer to 5:00/km.  I ran the next 5.5 km or so at that pace, and then tried to finish the last km a bit faster.  

Overall, I call the race a success.  I finished in a time of 47:20, which is 10 seconds faster than my goal.  More important, that’s about 90 seconds faster than my previous best.  If it was a few degrees cooler, or if there were more wooded areas, I probably could have run faster.  The same organizers are putting on a 5 km evening race next month, and I’m thinking about signing up.