Another great race

Yesterday's race: 8km, 56 minutes

Yesterday I did my 8km race. I wasn't really sure how it would go... for a number of reasons. I had only run 8km once before, in training last weekend, and that took me 1 hour 6 mins. So I figured I would be a bit quicker, but still slow! I was tired when I got up in the morning too, plus I didn't have breakfast. Now I don't usually have breakfast before I run on weekends, but I hadn't counted on how long I would be awake before I actually ran (then it took me almost an hour to get done). So by the time I started, I was pretty hungry! Also it's been pretty warm the last few days (finally a hint of summer!) but yesterday morning waiting around for the race to start was pretty cool temperatures and I hadn't taken a jumper with me.

Anyway despite all those things, I started off in my usual very slow starting pace. I know that when I get better, I will need to run a km or two before races to get the legs going and find a good pace, but the problem is now that if I added a km warm up, then I would struggle to run the actual distance. Basically all of the field except for two old men shot off in the distance, but the three of us kept shuffling along. I think it was about 2km before I really got into a good rhythm and a pretty fast pace (at least for me), which was about 7 min kms. As soon as I got running, the sun really started beating down, and there was no shade on the course. It was around a cycling / walking track around a bay of Sydney Harbour, which was a great location, and I had lots of things to look at and think about, which really helped! A nice flat course too.

My intial goal when I started was that it would have been nice to run the race 6 mins faster than my training run and to do it in an hour. Once I was about halfway and realised that that wouldn't be a problem, I revised it to wanting to run 7 min kms, ie. to finish in 56 mins. As I got past halfway and my legs still felt good, I did try and crank things up a gear so that I could finish in less that 55 mins. The last couple of kms were certainly faster, and I made up ground, but only just got in under 56 minutes.

I'm still reasonably happy with that effort. There's of course plenty of room for improvement, but I guess that will happen over time. The great thing about the race (well, one of them anyway) was the post race pancakes that were provided. I had mine with nutella and undid all my calorie burning efforts! I also met before and after a few more Cool Runners (from the Aussie Coolrunning website) which was nice. There were some others that I didn't "meet" persay, but that I recognised.

My right ankle and right hip/back were just a tad sore yesterday afternoon, so a rest day today, and hopefully some more kms tomorrow.