November 26th, 2006
Old Reliable 10K Run
Its been a while since I updated, I can tell cause those piece of **** spammers have registered a bunch of users on my message board again. Of course they are now deleted, they seem not to care that I disabled the website entry on the registrations which means they will get zero traffic by spamming my site. I guess its enough to be a harassment and annoyance since thats the only reason they exist anyway. Im not bitter, just wish every single spammer would get hit by a car, heal up, then get hit again perpetually till they die of old age.
I did the Old Reliable 10K Run for the second time in downtown Raleigh. I did this race last year with my friend Zack. It was his first organized run and I offered to do it with him to keep myself in shape after last years Ride for the Roses and not let myself fall too far out of shape for building up for this years ride. Since he had never run a distance like that before or a race we ran together with me pacing us by my heart rate monitor since we’re physically a similar shape. We did the whole race at 80% with me kicking up with about half a mile to go and passing about 30 people. Sounds impressive but when there are over a 1000 runners its not hard to do.
This year Zack planned on running it again and we met up at my place and headed down. It had been raining all morning but luckily finished up right before we headed out to the start. By race time it was just a mist but still fairly chilly. I let Zack know that i was going to try to push myself a bit so I’d meet him at the finish. We both planned on beating last years time.
I got out at a decent pace with my first mile around 7:42. The second I slowed up to around 8:30 and then was able to do negative splits the rest of the miles topping back out at slightly under 8 minutes a mile. The course has plenty of long gradual hills that make you ache and suffer the whole way up them. After reading some articles and talking with other runners I decided to try to peg my heart rate at about 85-90% of my max which basically had me running at right around 170bpm. That pace definitely made me suffer more than usual and thoughts of quitting weren’t hard to come by but luckily i didnt. I remembered the quote by Lance Armstrong I read at this years Livestrong Challenge about not remembering pain but never forgetting quitting. There was also a girl in front of me for a couple miles with a shirt that read “Running is a mental sport…cause we’re all crazy” which kept me going as well.
At the end I attempted to do a kick but couldnt even get one started. For the first time I found myself being passed at the finish and completely and utterly spent. Normally I can pick up a few spots in the last block or so but when I tried I couldnt even close the gap on people a few feet ahead so backed off. I was able to stretch out some and walked back a few blocks to run in with Zack to the finish to cool down.
Zack finished 53:48 at a pace of 8:43 and finished 452nd which was 2:59 seconds faster than last year and 54 seconds a mile faster on his pace. In the end my time was 48:37 at a pace of 7:53 a mile. Just like the Nike 5K the week before it was a new personal best for the distance. I was 241st out of 762 competitive runners and 20th out of 50 in my division. Last year I finished in 57:16 at a pace of 9:16 a mile. Then I was 672 out of 913 and cant find my division place. Overall a pretty good improvement. I shaved 8:39 seconds off my overall time and 1:23 off my pace per mile. I cant complain about those numbers at all. My goal next year is to crack the top 100.
