UAH Spring 10K and Not (Really) Running for 2 Weeks



2010 UAH Spring 10K (photo I used for the Fleet Feet racing team website)
Photo by Bob Gower

 

2011 UAH Spring 10K
Photo by Gregg Gelmis


The UAH Spring 10K was held on Sunday, March 6 at 2:00 p.m.  How exciting for me to have my mom and dad watch the kids while I ran alone for the first time all week!  I got to the race at 1:30 and set off for a cold warm up.  Temps were in the 30's that day--brrrr!  I am not in much shape for 10Ks, as I noticed soon after the start.  My first mile was 6:30, but I knew I couldn't hold that pace for another 5 miles.  Second and third miles were both 6:47, then I dropped to 7:09 and 7:15.  Mile 6 was 6:43 (finally back to a sub-7!), and I finished in 42:44, a 6:53 pace.  It was nice to have my Sunday School friend, Patrick, nearby for most of the race.  He pushed me and kept me going.  He finished with me and ended up with his PR that day by something like 6 minutes!

Upon my finishing the race, my parents returned the kids to me.  Apparently the kids had spent the entire race throwing acorns at a utility box (I was assured that they were not throwing them at people!).  We went inside the UAH fitness center to wait for the awards.  I was trying to keep the kids contained and quiet, and they were just wild!  There was a ton of extra food (in fact, the volunteers were asking people to take whole bags of bread and boxes of cookies), so I got some honey sandwiches, bananas, and cookies for my kids to occupy them during the awards.  I was second overall female and first in my age group.  The prize was a $20 Fleet Feet gift certificate.  It is a great race when you can win your entry fee back in Fleet Feet gift certificates!  I plan to buy a Life is Good shirt there tomorrow with the certificate.

I didn't set too much of a goal for myself in this race, just to get roughly what I was doing in 10Ks last year.  The best one I did last year was 44:01 in Cotton Row, so I aimed at 43:00 to get a little better than that.  It was a really rough goal (I didn't even know the pace that it would require) so I managed to meet that goal merely by luck.  I looked back at last year's results and found that I was also second to Candace Jacobs, but my time was 45:20, a 7:18 pace.  It is good to see my times getting faster, but I am still 2 minutes off of my 10K PR.  I mentioned it to Rick.  I told him I know that endurance (all the marathons and marathon training) doesn't equal speed, but after PRing in the marathon last month, I guess I was expecting to suddenly get a 10K PR too.  Well, it doesn't work that way!  Seriously though, he gave me a website, Vdot Calculator and Training Paces, that can help you figure out what your pace should be in an event when another distance's time is given.  (It is actually probably alot more complicated than that but I found the calculator there to be helpful and thought you might too!)  I entered my recent marathon time and the 10K time it gave me was--you guessed it--the 43 minutes I was aiming for all along.  So sometimes intuition is right, above all of the formulas others can give you.  The website also gave me a bunch of other times that I am supposed to aim for when running easy, marathon pace, intervals, etc.  It seems a little too complicated for what I want to do right now, but it is nice to know that is what I should be able to do.

I was so happy when Rick returned from his two-week business trip a day early, and I could again run in the mornings with my friends.  I missed their company and the regularity of my routine.  I had met a couple of my friends during the week to run, and both times I pushed the double jogger.  It was so much more work to put the kids in the stroller and to keep them occupied the whole time.  The second time I ran, I met my friend Kristen.  We aimed for 6 miles, but when we got back to the cars and were still .4 of a mile short, I told her that was close enough for me and called it quits (I watched her finish the last .4 alone with a secret envy).  I stopped not because I couldn't push them any further (actually she was pushing them for the last mile or so!), but because they'd started bickering and I'd had enough.  It just wasn't fun.  It sometimes takes runs (and weeks) like that to really appreciate the early morning hours of freedom that I do have.