My First Sub 50-Minute 10K

• Posted: September 13, 2008
• |
• Author: Shéamus
• |
• Filed under: Benchmarks, Observations, Workouts
• |
• Tags: No tags set for this entry.

The admission within that title is pretty lame - actually, it’s embarrassing. To be through over 100 days of all this and not have broken fifty minutes over 10K seems quite poor. However, the reality is since this all started I’ve only ran an actual 10K twice, with times of 52:02 and 51:02 respectively. The reality is that my default, middle-distance is about five miles. Whenever I go beyond that, I typically run ten miles or more (with the odd 8-miler thrown in for good measure). I’ve gone beyond 10K many, many times, but have only set out to actually run the distance (with intent) twice. All that said, to not have a sub-fifty minute 10K on my resume is pretty pathetic.

As I said to Spartan7 in the comments section, my goal this weekend was to run seven miles or so on both days (which kind of goes against what I just said above, but stay with me here). I was less interested in speed and more in just getting the miles in.

I ran just after five pm. Three miles in, I was doing the math on my Garmin and it suddenly dawned on me that if I could just maintain an 8-minute/mile pace the rest of the way (i.e., the closing 3.2 miles) I could not only comfortably beat my personal best over the 10K distance, but I had every chance of going below the 50-minute mark, too.

It sounded good to me. So that’s what I did.

In fact, I did a lot better than that. Carefully monitoring my Garmin all the way, I figured that if I could get to the six-mile point somewhere between 47 and 48 minutes, I could really put my foot down for the final 0.2 and record a half-decent time. To accomplish this, I had to run a 7:34 mile six, and a 7:06 final 0.2.

My time for the 10K was 48:21.

Sure, it’s no world record (which is a staggering 26:17.53) but it’s a new accomplishment. And to be honest, I could have knocked another 30 seconds or so off of that first three miles if I’d actually set out to run a 10K in the first place. I also stopped to take a drink from a water fountain part of the way through mile three, too, which added another 10 seconds or so.

I don’t have an enormous amount of interest at racing over these shorter distances (and I already feel that 10K is a short run) but I’d like to break the 45-minute mark for 10,000m. That’s a reasonable goal for the future. According to the excellent McMillan Running Calculator, to accomplish this I’d need to be consistently running around 21:39 over 5K, and 35:53 over five miles. Both of these seem pretty hardcore at the moment, but I’ll definitely get there.

This also, incidentally, ties in with an estimated marathon time of about three and a half hours, which is one of my main goals, too.

Oh - after my 10K, I took a moment to catch my breath and then jogged the 0.80 miles home, so I got my seven miles done as planned.

Splits:

• (1) Comments
• Permalink
• RSS 2.0
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•