Well, I can say this with great joy: GOAL ACHIEVED!!!
You may remember my running goal this year was to achieve a personal best in a distance I have raced. Well, despite all the downs of the year I finally managed to align the stars for a race. This race. The Bridge2Brisbane 10k fun run.
And to think I almost didn't sign up for it! So focussed on my Whitsunday run, I had half decided to give this one a miss before changing my mind.
My personal best in this distance was from Doomben in 2009, when I ran 54.18min. I have had a few other 10k runs, but never did the stars seem to align properly...
Noosa 10k (May) - I was battling a knee injury and paced myself wrong
Doomben 10k (June) - I started the race over-heated trying to keep dry from the rain
Park2Park 10k (July) - after 4 weeks of holidays, I didn't actually expect to get a pb on this hilly course
Brisbane Festival 10k (July) - one week after Ipswich Park2Park, I just wanted to get a better time than that disaster
So, on to this race! (I know everyone's dying to hear what I got...we'll get to that). It started up a hill. A big looong hill. Well, actually it started a couple hours before that, with the alarm going off at 3.45am, a drive, a walk & a bus ride before I got to the start shortly after 5am. And brrrr, it was cold! I may have started singing children's French songs and doing the gestures to them to try and keep warm, but it's all a bit of a blur.
My running friends and I finally crossed the start line around 6.15am among 29.000 other people running the 10k that morning. And then we hit the Gateway bridge, climbing for just over 1k and tall enough to allow large ships pass underneath. I quickly lost the rest of my crew at that point - I was in for my own race.
I let myself go slow up over the bridge (about a 6min pace) - no sense pushing it too hard at the start! I gained speed on the way down, going down to a 5min pace. As the hill flattened to level ground and I kept that 5min pace up easily for the next 2k, I knew I could do a pb in this race if I played it smart. So, despite the lack of fatigue, I kept pulling myself back to sit between a 5.15-5.20 pace.
At 7k, I was still feeling good and started to pick it up a bit. Then the second hill came.
Despite my best efforts, I started to slow as the hill really took it out of me. But darned if I was going to lose out on a pb so close to the end! As my breathing became rapid and wheezy, I remembered a trick someone had taught me for controlling it back down. A silly little trick that I honestly thought would never work - until it did. Go figure.
So as we came down and around that hill and around the corners I just kept focussing on my breathing and going as hard as I could.
I can't say I finished with my typical kick at the end, but I finished in 54.00min, and that's good enough for me.
Total distance: 10.18km
Total time: 54.00min
Total elevation: 110m
Average pace: 5.18min
And for interest sake, if I cut off the extra 0.18km tacked onto the 10k and went with a 10.00km time, that would have been 50 seconds faster. However, I'm counting the race distance as the official time, rather than my Garmin. It's only fair.
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