Canada 10K Race Report

Race Start - 8:30am
Temperature - 63º
Time - 1:11:37

Race Goals

A Goal (perfect, better than average day) - a time of under 1:15
B Goal (average day) - beating my previous PR of 1:15:45
C Goal (less than average day) - a time of under 1:29

I got up at 5:30 this morning and had two pieces of bread with peanut and a bottle of flavored water.  After I ate, I went back to sleep for almost an hour.  It was nice to get some extra sleep.  I got up for real at 6:30 and got all dressed.  In the process of getting ready, I discovered that my iPod had some how lost all of my playlists!  I was very unhappy.  I was a little nervous and stressed about the race and keeping a good pace and not being able to have my music added more stress to that.  When I looked closer, I saw that it still some how had my songs.  We really had to go, so I quickly wrote down the songs that were on my playlist and planned on quickly making a playlist from those.

When I got in the car and tried to make the new playlist, my iPod froze.  Thankfully, I was able to do a soft reset.  When I did the reset, it somehow brought back all of my playlists!  I was glad that it had fixed itself!  It made my stress level decrease dramatically.

We got parked and finally located the check in tent.  After I got my number, I had to to another table to get my shirt and then to another table to get my timing chip.  Since this race also had a couple different lengths of triathlons and duathlons, the timing chips were attached to a Velcro ankle bracelet.  It was a different way of managing the timing and once I got it on, I never even noticed it.

I only had about 10 minutes to get to the start line, so we hurried over.  They gave some instructions, since there were 3 different races starting at the same place, and I hurried over to the bathroom.  I got back to the line with just enough time to do my warm up, toss my jacket to my husband and start up my iPod before they sent us off.

Walking towards the starting line.

The race was an out and back route that was 5 kilometers after one loop, so us 10K people got to do the whole thing twice.  Since it was in Canada, there were kilometer markers instead of mile markers.  I had hoped to average 7:30 per kilometer which would get me a time of under 1:15.  I really liked that the race was marked out in kilometers.  The race math was much easier to do and the distance seemed to go by more quickly. 

I thought that doing a lap would be completely unfun, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  It was actually kind of nice on the second half of the race to have visual reference to where each km was.  I started out just wanting to run as long as I could without stopping (I always walk water stops since I have yet to master the art of drinking while running).  I was on the second half of the race when I realized that I hadn't done any walking, except for my water stops, so I decided to see if I could do the whole thing without stopping to walk.

For most of the last two kilometers, I was trying to catch up with another lady in front of me.  I did catch up with her about half a kilometer from the end and asked her if she wanted to run with me for the last bit of the race.  So we ran together for most of the end.  We were almost to the end when she started to fade a little and dropped back.  So I started pushing, since I had lost my running partner, and tried to pass the one last person in between me and the end of the race.  I ran as hard as I could and ended up passing her right before the finish line!

After the race!

According to my chip time, I finished in 1:11:59, but according to my stop watch I finished in 1:11:37!  Yay!  I was still nearly last (40th out of 44) but there was more than enough food and water at the finish so things were all good.