In a moment of endorphin-induced madness, the day after my first ever 10k, I signed up for my second ever 10k only two weeks later. Well, no pain no gain as they say…
The Training
After taking a few days to recover from Run To The Beat, I managed to pack in two short but speedy runs, one 8.5k run in the glorious French sunshine, two extreme spin bootcamps, a quick 30 minute PT session and a #PumpSweatandBurn class. No way was I going to let my fitness disappear from my first run…
I managed to taper on the Thursday and Friday before the run and spend two days sitting around eating huge quantities of food to celebrate the Jewish New Year.
All in all, not bad preparation but not great…
The Race
Having slept awfully the night before the race and eaten far too much for dinner, I dragged myself up and forced down a Nakd berry bar. My enthusiasm levels for this race were distinctly lower than the last one…
We arrive at Finsbury Park in plenty of time to have a nose around the little tents that were set up and have a good stretch and sit down. It was only a small event, the smallest that I’ve done but there was a great tent run by the Scouts that was serving tea, cake and biscuits.
After an energetic and useful warm up we were ushered to the start line and Heron and I tucked ourselves in behind the 70-minute pacer. That’s what we were aiming for at Run To The Beat and as the course here was much hillier, we were just aiming to stick with the pacer and not go much faster.
The hills hit pretty quickly, at around 1.5k but we plodded up and down until we realised that the course was taking us back round for a second loop. I’m not a fan of laps on courses because generally I lack motivation to do the second lap, something that kicked in here as I knew all of the hills that I would have to tackle again.
However, there’s no excuse to stop. So I didn’t. At around 6k I started struggling up the hills and Heron kicked away from me. I fixed my eyes on her back and promised myself not to lose sight of her.
Helped by that and by the brilliant pacer, the hills on the second lap seemed to be easier as I overtook some walkers and powered through. By 8k I was ahead of the pacer (but not by far) and so when I came to the 9k marker and heard my last pace update through my headphones I put the accelerator down and flew the final kilometre.
Coming round the final corner the clock read 01:08:29 which surprisingly gave me 34 seconds to get home to beat my RTTB time. I legged it. As you can see from the photo…
It was only when I crossed the finish line and received my chip time that I realised I’d come in at 01:07:59, knocking a whopping 01:03 off my previous PB.
Chuffed faces all round.
The Results
1st km: 06:56
2nd km: 06:58
3rd km: 06:44
4th km: 06:40
5th km: 06:57
6th km: 06:41
7th km: 07:03 (this is where I struggled)
8th km: 06:46
9th km: 06:48
10th km: 06:20 (this is where I legged it!)
5k split: 34:15
10k split: 33:44 (woohoo for negative 5k splits!)
TOTAL TIME: 01:07:59
I’m pretty booked up with library and classroom sessions for my Personal Trainer course from now until January but my next race is booked in for 1st February, the Winter Run 10k along the Thames.
If anyone fancies some cold-weather running in the meantime, let me know!