Perfect 10 Miler

The Perfect 10 Miler has been run for the last 5 years now, and now including this one, I've done each of the 5. Here are my times for the first 4:

2004: 66.5
2005: 67.5
2006: 64
2007: 67

2006, of course, was my good year in recent history. 2008 has been shaping up fairly well recently. I've lost some weight and am down in the 154-155 range. My times are better than last year, with a couple 41 minute 10K's. With the tuesday speedwork sessions to boot, I feel like I'm on the upswing. This race would be a good test.

On the downside, I feel pretty well beat up much of the time. And the bottom of my left foot has been aching even more than the rest of it, and me. I tried to get some amount of rest before the race. But even so, I felt a little sore during my warmup.

With starting line temps in the 60s, it was warm, but not really hot. I'm fairly sure that I've always done negative splits at this race, and I wanted to do the same. So I started conservatively.

The first three miles were at 6:25, 6:39 and 6:35. Some of us missed a turn on the next mile but probably only lost a few seconds, but I'm not really sure. The split was 6:44. The next two miles (5 and 6) are on an uphill grade, and are usually slow ones for me. It turned out that they weren't as bad as I anticipated: 6:48 and 6:47. Half-way went by in 33:13.

At this point I was hoping to really pick the pace up. I'd been able to do that for past races, and I thought I could today. Sure enough, Mile 7 was my best at 6:07. But Mile 8, which is also downhill, was a disappointing 6:44. I had remembered that mile 9 was slow and tough, and it didn't disappoint. It was my slowest at 6:50. The overall time at this point was something like 59:45 Now I had to really turn it on to try to come in at 66 minutes or better. The best I could do was a 6:25 to finish in 66:10.

I believe this put me in 12th or 14th place overall. Something like that. And more importantly, 1st in my age group. Got a canvas duffle bag for that.

So this was my 2nd best of these, but nowhere near my first best. Still, it was a good indicator of my fitness. We'll see where it goes from here.