A change of Pace

Thursday I received an e-mail from a co-worked who had heard I was running the 10K today. At this point I did not even realize the 10K was this weekend. I had not registered or planned on registering for a running race. I had however tossed the idea around about doing it sometime though.

The reason she was interested is that they needed an employee who ran the event to accept the BIG cheque for 1/2 of the proceeds of the pledges for the race. The race benefits the two hospitals in town. I ran the idea past my wife and it was a go.

I floated a joke on twitter about a two day training plan and got a couple pledges myself. I changed my workout plan for the week from trying to run every day on lunch to take a down day and go for a easygoing ride on Friday. Saturday we did some fun stuff with the kids and hit Oktoberfest daytime activities with the kids. Planned on getting lots of sleep but that was not in the cards as both kids got us up in the night and my son was up at 6:30am.

Woke up this morning feeling a little groggy and grabbed some cereal and showered and got ready. Threw a spare hammer gel in my gym bag with my change of clothes and downed a helping of heed and off to the mall to get my chip. The mall was crazy full of runners walking in all directions performing pre-run rituals. I don't really have any of these rituals so I just went and found somewhere to hang out and stretch before the race.

I did not really know much about where I should position myself in a running race so I started off a bit further back that I probably should have. After the Canadian anthem we were sent off by a horn. I spent the first few minutes passing people before the 1Mile marker and crossed it at 6 minutes and change. I then fell into a pace behind a few people and advanced slowly as they fell off.

I crossed 5K at 22:05 and knew I was pacing pretty well for myself but was expecting to go downhill from there. Turned out I grabbed onto another guy for pace on a climb and when he weakened I passed him and 3 others. At 7K I got a big boost and passed a few more but got passed by some young guns. From 8K to 9.5K I followed my last pace pair in and then gave a strong boost and passed about 8-10 people before crossing the line at a hair under 45 minutes. I am waiting for them to post exact time on the web page but I ended up in 4th place in the 35-40 category. I am extremely pleased as I was not training for this and have never run a distance of 10K before even outside of racing.

After the race I took the family and we all had some good eats provided for the event and then had that picture taken with the big cheque that got me there in the first place. Today was a good day!

I am contemplating training for a marathon at some point but I think I likely wont do that on a whim.

Well that's it for now, I'm out...

(Edit: Looking at last years results while waiting for this years I am hoping that I did not look in the wrong column and get excited about my place over nothing. Potentially not 4th place after all, will confirm as soon as I see it posted.)

O'all                                 Gun       Class       Gender  Pace   Chip
Place  Bib         Name              Time      Placing       Place   /Mi   Time   City
----- ----- -----------------      ------- ----------------- ----- ----- ------- ----------

97  1836 Mike Osborne             45:38 LM35-39   17/53      90  4:34   45:28   Kitchener 

(And there it is, wrong column and not 4th place. Did not seem right but was exciting to think I had done that well.)

Race Results