Race Report: 10K on the 10th / Human Race

After the 15K on Sunday, we spent the rest of the Disney vacation hitting all the parks - fun, but tiring! We flew home on Wednesday. I have to say, it was really nice to have a two day work week. Wish they could all be like that.

My first workout since returning home was for Nancy's 10K on the 10th. I noticed the day before that there happened to be a local 10K race on Saturday so I figured, why not?

So Saturday morning, I headed to the Human Race of Silicon Valley. They had a 5K walk, 5K run, and 10K run.

For this race, I decided to push myself a little more than usual. Before I used to be really careful with my pace during the first mile because I was afraid I wouldn't have anything left at the end. So I was going to experiment a bit with this one.

It worked out well! I started out at a sub-10:00 minute pace and managed to stay there for the whole race. But there were two issues:

1. The course: Maybe my Garmin was off, but the course seemed to be slightly longer than 6.2 mi. There was no mile one marker and at the mile two marker, my watch read 2.19 mi. From there on out, my watch consistently read an extra 0.19 mi at each mile marker. Normally, it wouldn't be an issue, but apparently, they mis-routed the 5K race and it ended up being 2.56 miles only. So who knows! Other runners were also commenting on the 10K distance as well. (I should have added this to Marcy's list of racing pet peeves.)

2. Merging walkers with runners: The race had separate courses for the 5K walk, 5K run, and 10K run. Until the end that is... during mile 6 of the 10K run, we ended up merging with the walkers and to me, it felt like total chaos. First, I couldn't find any course monitors to confirm I was supposed to be merging with them so that slowed me down. Second, I had to deal with weaving around all the walkers - it was so frustrating. We were so close to the finish and should be focused on accelerating to the end but instead any extra energy we had was wasted on weaving around the crowds. It was just like my run that coincided with the March of Babies walk - I had to ask people to let me pass but this time, it was so tiring to yell out the requests. Some were nice, though, and cheered me on as I ran past. But I am bummed to have lost steam during that segment. Thankfully, we separated later on as we had separate finish lines.

But overall - I did great! I haven't seen these kind of splits in a long time!

1: 9:21
2: 9:38
3: 9:37
4: 9:30
5: 9:39
6: 9:41
0.39: 3:25 (8:46 pace)

Total: 6.39 mi, 1:00:49, 9:31 pace

Here's my dilemma... the official race results have not been posted yet AND I'm still a little skeptical about their course. So for Nancy's 10K on the 10th, I'm going to stay consistent and refer to my Garmin time and distance.

Keeping the same times for the 6 miles, I will extrapolate (+1) the time for the 0.2 mi by using the pace for the last 0.39 miles (8:46 pace) from the original run.

Nancy's 10K on the 10th
Total = 6.2 mi, 0:59:11, 9:33 pace

And that, my friends, is a new PR! Only by 7 seconds though... but the last time I ran this pace for a 10K was three years ago!



May 18th Update:

Finally got the official results from the Human Race:

Distance 10K
Clock Time 1:01:00
Overall Place 184 / 310
Gender Place 60 / 128
Division Place 41 / 88
Age Grade 49.9%
Total Pace 9:49/M

Eh.