Well, we did it! Jeremy and I ran our first 10km race on Sunday. It was GREAT! Aside from a couple of blisters I still feel great afterwards - I'm not sore at all, which is incredible. It was a pretty tough course - the race director must have the devil on his shoulder whispering mean ideas in his ear because there was a killer hill at the end. Why they can't put the bad stuff at the beginning while you're still fresh and eager is beyond me! Oh well.
Sunday morning was absolutely perfect - low 60's, a little cloudy but still nice. Our 6-mile run during the week had been pretty slow and painful so we lined up towards the back of the pack to keep out of everyone's way. We started out extremely slow (the lady at mile marker 1 called out our time of 13-something minutes), and it seemed like everyone sped on ahead. At one point, there were only a handful of people behind us - when I noticed that I very nearly threw in the towel. I didn't want to be so far back - truth be told, I was embarrassed. I figured there was no way we could keep up and run a respectable time, and I would HATE to be last! After mile marker 1 we hit the old baseball park - we had to run around the perimeter. I think we ran downhill for a moment and then we had to run back up, which was pretty tough. Somehow, we started to pick up the pace and our strides were much longer than they are during our training runs, which felt great! All those people who had started out so fast began to slow down and we were catching up! We started picking people off and when they called out our time at mile marker 2 we had run about 2 minutes faster than our mile 1 pace. The next few miles were great - we had found our rhythm, and I just kept picking a person in front of us, we'd chase them down, then pick the next person. We were doing a lot of passing and not getting passed by many. We had one quick water stop (I learned I CANNOT drink and run at the same time), then it was down Capitol Hill, along the straight-away and back up. At the base of the hill was a guy with a cowbell, holding a sign that said "Git er done!" - what a riot! Then came the hill and boy oh boy was it BIG!! I really, really tried to run the whole thing, but towards the top I felt almost faint and we had to walk for a minute. With the mean ol' hill behind us, we picked up the pace again, and pushed hard for the 3/4 mile of so until the finish. I felt great crossing the line, and although our time was still slow, we ran 5 mins faster than our training run during the week. We finished in 70:26.
I definitely learned a few things from this race -
1. Competitors at a 10km are a LOT different from those at a 5km. Quite clearly they are people who have been running for some time - while we were somewhere in the middle of our 5k race, we were definitely towards the end of the 10k.
2. I'm not coordinated enough to drink and run, as learned when I splashed water up my nose.
3. Hills are hard, and will be incorporated more frequently into our training runs.
4. It's ok to have a slow start - it just means you'll feel great when you start passing all those folks who went out too fast!
5. I need to get better socks to stop my poor feet from suffering with blisters!
I felt like it was a GREAT race and, even though I was really nervous at the beginning and didn't think I could do it, I'm so glad we ran. Now I have to work on getting FAST, so we can give mum and dad something to cheer for when they watch us run the Marine Corps Marathon 10km race in October.
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