PIKE'S PEEK 10K (race report):

This is the fastest 10k course in town, where I ran 37:48 last year. That stood as my 10k PR going into this race. Initially I was gunning for 36:30 as my goal for this year's race. But I didn't get around to doing any actual training faster than easy pace in the two weeks since the Cherry Blossom 10-miler, and I didn't do much before that either. So, although I started this race at 36:30 pace (5:52/mi.), I didn't really expect to be able to hold it very long. Here are my mile splits:

mile 1 - 5:51
mile 2 - 5:54
mile 3 - 5:58
mile 4 - 6:04
mile 5 - 6:10
mile 6 - 6:14
finish - 37:23

My finishing time was a PR by 25 seconds, and the first half of this race was the second fastest 5k I've ever run (18:20). So I can't complain. But looking at those splits, you can see that I didn't run a particularly good race. I slowed down at a pretty consistent rate after the first mile. My average pace turned out to be 6:01/mi. If I had run 5:57 pace from the beginning, could I have run a sub-37 today? Probably. But this is Pike's Peek, where one goes for a crazy fast time. I'm not sure that I worked as hard as I possibly could have today, but certainly 36:30 wasn't going to happen. Maybe I could have gutted out 36:59, but I never really gave up and am happy with a 25 second PR off of so little training. The first 5k was especially encouraging, given that my next race (in two weeks) is a 5k and today I was far from running all out during only the first half. If I can find time to do some actual training, then I can hope realistically to beat my still fresh 5k PR of 17:58. By the way, there are so many super-fast people at Pike's Peek that I ran 6.2 miles at 6:01/mi. pace and only got 96th place overall!