86

I had signed up for a 10k race with good ole MEC. It was a last minute decision. I needed to get a few extra k's under my feet but I didn't want to exhaust myself with a race. The idea, I decided, was to practise.
I had two goals in mind:
1. To discover what it feels like (at this point) to run at my goal race pace for 10k
2. To work on my running cadence and form.

When the gun went off, I enjoyed the lack of self-inflicted pressure to perform well. I hung towards the back of the crowd.
It was interesting to be taking it easy. I passed some people at the 2nd km that were already gasping. I'm not sure how they were going to manage the next 8k!

As far as goal 1 goes, I wasn't expecting much. In half marathons I can usually keep on target race pace until 12k or so, and then I start slowing down. So just to go 10k, I didn't think I'd hit that point of fatigue. And I didn't.
But I got a good feel for what a 5min40sec pace feels like, and with the exception of the 8k mark, every other km was within 5sec of that goal time. I felt slightly fatigued at the end but nothing unmanageable. Still, I have a long way to go before I could maintain that pace for twice the distance.
It was also of interest to note how many people I passed on the second half of the course. Ah yes, those runners just like me who deceive themselves into believing "I can hold this pace for 10k easy!" and then don't. Poor suckers. How well I know your frustrations!

I focussed on keeping as steady a pace as I could, and at the same time I periodically counted my cadence, to see how fast my feet were hitting the pavement.
I've been told that ideally a person's cadence is 180 foot strikes per minute. There is no way I could count every footstep (and it is in fact especially hard when I am near other runners and get confused as to who's foot is hitting the ground when), so I did what most people do and divided in half to count every step on one foot. So my goal number ended up being 90. I really worked on keeping my cadence fast. But this also typically means my speed picks up, so it was a joint effort of fast cadence/easy pace.
Most times I got 86. There were a few 84s and I even went down as slow as 80 when I wasn't paying attention. But no matter how "fast" I told my feet to go, I seemed stuck at 86.
Oh well. At least it's not too far off!