Monday 21 June 2010

10km PB attempt

Naturally I'm on holiday so what else does one do but find the local track and attempt a 10km pb. The local track that I talk of is in my wife's home town of Györ in Hungary. Its a great track 1/3 mile in length that circles a lake so pleasant surroundings. Recently built too to provide much needed recreation to residents in the surrounding housing estate. So whilst the in-laws went to the garden to pick vegetables for tea, my dad and I went to track. This was straight after being fed pancakes with cottage cheese and lemon filling. Perfect pre-race food :-/  however I only had 1 whilst I watched on as my dad ate 3! He wasn't going for a 10km pb though.

I set the garmin to metric so I could accurately measure pace and distance. I was aiming for a sub 40 minute 10km (my 10km race pb is 42mins whilst in training I've clocked 40:08 but from memory that was 6miles not 10km so probably need to add a minute to that time). A sub 40min requires a sub 4 minute km pace (which is sub 6:30 min/miling). It felt relatively easy early on but there was a wicked head wind on the back straight which was quite a fight on every lap, but kept me focused. I kept to the task though and pounding out the laps and kept an eye on the pace which started on 3:56 and rose to an average of 3:58 for much of the distance. It did creep up to 3:59 too as I tired a little but with the last few kms closing in I knew I couldn't throw it all away now and had to stick to the task. After 8km my breathing was hard and I fought to stay on pace but did just this and managed to complete the 18 and a bit laps (10km exactly according to Garmin) in 39:27. My mile splits were 6:21, 6:24, 6:24, 6:25, 6:27, 6:09. Plus 1:14 for the last 350m.

I went back and celebrated with more pancakes! yummy :-P

3 comments:

  1. Well done mate. Fantastic effort.

    All you need to do now is get yourself to a 10k race while you feel sharp to get an official race time.

    Pancakes sound interesting. You should post the recipe as they obviously provided a welcome nitro boost :-)

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  2. Great way to run a sub-40 Stu. A nice 33 second cushion to repeat in a race too - but at the end of the day you know you've done it! Now get out and do some more holiday-like stuff, you canm't have had enough pancakes if you can run so fast still :¬)

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  3. Very impressive Stu. How can you run that fast? I push the limits to average 7 min miles on a 5k.

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