Rob's Running Blog

East Manchester 10k – A 1hr plus personal worst!

Given my training this year, with long runs, and a sub 54 in my last race, and feeling good in the week, I had some hopes of a reasonable time in this race, possibly sub 52. But it was really not meant to be!

It was quite a chilly morning, I had to stand in the sunlight at the bus stop just to stop shivering, and was glad to get on the warm bus! Got to the venue in plenty of time and did the usual stuff of milling around and finding the toilets, before doing a gentle jogging warmup and joining in with the mass warmup a little bit.

They lined us up in 3 waves, fast at the front, medium, and walkers etc – though I wasn’t really sure what fast or medium meant so just put myself a few rows back. We had a countdown, then the horn didn’t go off, then it did, and off we all went! I started the Garmin but just had it set to show the time, and set off running how I felt, trying not to go too fast early on.

There was a bit of an incline then a descent, where I gathered speed, and then another descent. Then, as I thought, the payoff was some hills going the other way. I took these slowly, determined to conserve a bit of energy for the second half of the race, and tried to go back to a more normal pace when coming off the top of them.

At around 3k I tucked in behind another runner, and had a mini race with her, sharing the work, and it felt like we were doing a pretty decent pace, I was starting to breathe hard, but kept going, then we came to some more hills. When we got to 5k I glanced at the Garmin and to my chagrin in was showing 10.30 as the time. The race had started bang on 10, so it looked like my pace was actually horrendously slow… A little further on there was water station, I stopped to get a quick drink, at which point my companion seemed to speed off into the distance, I could see her for a while after that, and set myself a challenge of trying to catch her again, but it wasn’t happening. At about 7k there was a squall of torrential rain, which I would normally relish, but just found it irritating as it washed suncream into my eyes. By that point I had given up on the race, really, and decided to just use it as preparation for next weekend’s season finale – there was no point trying to push the pace and risk an injury. My Garmin felt much the same as when I glanced at the time for a prediction of just how bad my time would be, I saw that it had died in protest!! I got overtaken by people who had been a long way behind me, tried to stay with them, but couldn’t. By 9k I just wanted to see the finish line and stop, I walked a bit, a lady from the Steel City Striders gave me some encouragement, which helped me to actually run the last half km of the race.

As I approached the finish arch I saw the clock, I was surprised in fact that it was only just over the hour, as in my head I had got the time to 1hr 15 minutes!!! I smiled to myself as the PA man said “Stop being so casual about it number 46” as I guess I had just gone into a nonchalant jogging mode and to be honest had nothing left!

Felt really shattered after getting my t-shirt, and after cheering in some more runners, went and got a coffee in the cafe tent and sat mulling things over. I really had felt I was doing a half decent pace, and have run close to 50 minutes on courses with worse hills, and even my most unpleasant race ever which included the Vernon park mega hill 3 times on a monstrously humid evening, had not resulted in a time over one hour (in fact 55 mins I think). So I have no idea what happened apart from the fact it was just an off day. My last race was sub 54 in blistering heat, and I have done quite a bit of training since then, so didn’t really expect to run my SLOWEST EVER 10k race!

At this stage there is not much to be done before the City of Salford 10k next weekend, but once that’s done maybe I need to look at the drawing board again. I have complained of feeling slower in my intervals this year compared to last, maybe I am just getting slower. One thing I have not done this year is much in the way of 5k time trials, or tempo runs, so maybe that has been my achilles’ heel, or maybe I just had a bad day.

Will see how Salford goes. At least it will be very much flatter! 😀