Clarendon Day 10k (race report)

Well, that was a disappointing race. Let me go straight to my mile splits, which tell much of the story themselves:

mile 1 - 5:45
mile 2 - 5:32.5
mile 3 - 5:59
mile 4 - 6:12
mile 5 - 6:22
mile 6 - 6:30
finish - 38:05 (6:07/mi.)

It looks pretty obvious that running the second mile in 5:32, when I've never run a 10k faster than a 6:01 average pace, cooked me early on. And it did, but the course also had something to do with it. The Clarendon Day 10k course starts out downhill for the first mile and a half or so. The first mile is a net downhill but not steep. The second mile, however, begins with a steep downhill and then levels off. Knowing this, I just let myself roll through the first couple miles without straining or thinking about pace. My plan was to run 5:57s beginning in mile 3, which is sub-37 minute pace, no matter what my pace turned out to be in the first two miles. In the event, I noticed that my split for mile 1 was 5:45 just before starting the steep downhill. It felt like I coasted faster down that hill, but when I looked at my watch at the bottom of the hill it said 5:49 or something. So I didn't think I was going too fast and let the momentum from the hill propel me through the rest of that second mile at what felt like a fast but not uncomfortable clip. It wasn't until just before 2 miles that I looked at my watch again and realized that I was running 5:30 pace. Tall buildings and trees around the steep downhill must have prevented my watch from calculating the pace correctly earlier. But so far I felt ok, so after two miles I followed my plan and slowed to just under 6:00 pace. The 5k point on the course was not marked, but surely I got there well before my current 5k PR of 17:58, since I was at three miles in 17:16. After the downhill start, the course is mostly flat with low, rolling hills, a turn-around in the fourth mile at the top of a slightly bigger hill, and then an uphill finish. So everyone runs way faster on the first half of this course than the second. The latter two thirds of the course are almost right next to the Potomac river, and there was also some wind that somehow felt like a headwind no matter what direction we were going. Still, in spite of my faster pace in the early miles, I'm disappointed at not being able to stay under 6:00 pace from mile 3. In spite of having done only two speed workouts since March, I expected to be strong enough to run under 37 minutes today on this course and was annoyed that I didn't even get under 38. The three beers I had with and after dinner last night may also have had something to do with it. When it became obvious in mile 4 that I was losing it and saw the people near me start to pull away, I began thinking the same thoughts that often come to mind when I race poorly. How do those other people run so fast? I got 28th place overall, and I'm not delusional enough to think I could ever compete with the guys running sub-5 minute pace. But after those superhumans, there is usually a gap and then some mortals running in the mid- and upper-5s. I do compare myself with those people. It's not so much that I want to beat them as that I want to run with them, to count myself as one of them, partly as a sort of confirmation that, like them, I train hard and in the right ways. So when I see people running that sort of pace ahead of me after a turn-around or pulling away from me when I fall off the pace, my first thought is disbelief: how can those people run faster than me? There is no way they train harder or better than I do. Soon, usually after the race is over, this yields to a second set of thoughts: those people probably do train harder and/or smarter than me. The possibility that they may be more talented or younger than me doesn't detain me, since I choose to compare myself with them because I know that I can run their pace. (There are almost always people older than me who beat me anyway. Today there were four.) So eventually I settle into an attitude of respect for the hard work put in by the people who ran faster than me, and that motivates me to renew my own training efforts. It's useful to have a disappointing race now and then. But of course I didn't do it on purpose.