Sandy 10 Mile Race

Given the windy weather in the week leading up to this race, it was a relief to witness blue skies and light winds on Sunday morning. The clocks going forward robbed us of an hour in bed, but other than that, I was feeling positive about the race.

My time at the Nike MK HM in very windy conditions made me feel I could better my 10M PB of 01:01:01 set in Dec 2008. Having done Sandy 10 last year, I now felt the trick was to get up the big hill in mile 2 at a reasonable, but not suicidal pace. To this end, I had decided to run the whole race strictly within my lactate-threshold HR zone. If things were looking good by mile 8, they would look even better by the finish, as the last 2 miles is mostly down (the first 2 in reverse).



Sandy 10 and it's undulations - what goes around, comes around




Unfortunately, Gary Cook and I were unable to continue our (friendly) competition in the 12-month rolling 10M rankings due to Gary’s knee giving out again after about three miles. Hopefully, Gary will be back on top form soon.

The first 2 miles are the toughest and at the top of the hill my mile-pace was around 6:13, which I was quite happy with. By the 5 mile mark it was down to 6:05 and remained so by the 8 mile mark. This was a great boost as my PB 10M pace was 6:06 and I was ahead of this with a downhill 2M to come.

As I turned off the road onto the final 4-500m up to the school my watch was saying 6:00 pace! In general, I have found the Garmins are usually correct for average pace to within 2s either way. On this occasion, the error was not in my favour, and my actual mile pace was 6:02.1 – giving a time of 01:00:21.

Due to my immediate post-race delirium, I misread the watch as 01:00:00.21. Thus, when the results came up, I initially thought I’d been robbed of 21s. Closer inspection of the watch post-delirium revealed my school-boy error and avoided an embarrassing contestation of the time with race officials!

So, all-in-all, a very good day for me. A new 10M PB and MV45 Club Record (beating my own previous mark) and my first ever age% score over eighty (80.16%). My finishing position was 17th (6th MV40). Last year, the same time would have achieved 11th place and 5th MV40. Perhaps there was a stonger field this year as the race was also the Beds County Champs?

Given my mile-pace of 6:02.1 was very close to my 10k PB pace of 5:59.7, my next 10k race might be interesting.