A storm rolling into town two days prior to this race was a definite monkey wrench in my preparation for this race. I tapered and ran much shorter and easier miles this past week, even my speed session was toned down from my usual workouts. I was feeling really good all week until that snow storm but luckily we didn’t get hit the way I was expecting from all the hype. The old ruler in the snow test showed we got 6 inches which was completely fine in my book. The streets were clear for the most part, we had some slush but no ice which was my main concern.

My goal going into this race was 47:00. I was even hesitant about that time but good ole CoachC was right a couple weeks ago when she predicted I just might surprise myself.

I met up with my running partner as I was finishing up my warm up and as we were lining up I told her I had no idea what I was going to run. This completely surprised her because normally I have my paces set in my mind for each and every mile, I have it all planned out exactly how I’m going to run it. Today I decided I’d just go out and run, just see what happens. Even that 47:00 goal was just sort of hanging out there in limbo. It’s a number I had figured out weeks ago but hadn’t even bothered to go back in the past few days to figure out what that pace was or anything.

Today I decided to go by feel. I wanted to run this with a fairly even pace but not get too concerned with numbers. I’d go out, hold a pace, see how that felt on the hills, take it a bit easy for the first half of the race and use the hills to my advantage by speeding up going down and holding steady going up. If I felt like I was running too hard I’d pull back. I had recently read something about surging and doing this in a 10k distance sounded like it might work out well. I barely looked at my watch. I had turned off the sounds so I wouldn’t hear any chirps as the miles clicked by. The couple of times that I did look at my watch I was running anywhere between 7:00-7:30.

I pretty much passed people the entire race and was only passed a couple of times. This was good because it told me that I was holding steady as others were getting tired. Recently I’ve been running my tempo runs on the fast side which I did specifically for this race. That training tactic was definitely working to my advantage because the pacing today was feeling really easy. I figured it ought to feel easy for the first 3 miles and then I could start to pick things up somewhere between miles 4-5.

Everything was working out perfectly. I was really surprised at how good I was feeling. Looking back over my numbers I probably could have run the first half a bit harder for a more even effort. The 10k is such a neat distance, it’s a real shame there aren’t more of them.

mile 1 - 7:41
mile 2 – 7:24
mile 3 – 7:31
mile 4 – 7:22
mile 5 - 7:12
mile 6 - 7:10
mile 6.28 – 6:49

The course was altered due to the snow which added another hill to the course. Luckily I run these roads on Sundays which really helped me in the race. By the way, I got first in my age group! I was completely surprised by that, thinking I’d at the very best get either 2nd or 3rd place. I won a $20 gift certificate to one of the local running stores. Oh, and I got some cool, new Sock Guy socks with the race name, logo and date on it for being one of the first 100 runners. So, despite the totally awesome looking Brooks race shirt being too big on me at least I got a great pair of socks that I can wear.

Final time: 46:11 and 6.28 miles (7:22 pace)
Official time: 46:12 (7:26 pace)

Overall: 79/398 (19.8%)
Age group: 1/34 (2.9%)
Gender: 6/170 (3.5%)

Superbowl 10k Elevation Profile

2010 Superbowl 10k Course