November means the Abbey Dash. Last year I set my personal best over 10k, 56:45, which bested my previous PB of the awesome time of 59:59 set at the Leeds 10k.
This year I had a support time, as Elina and Venla came down to the starting pen. Much welcomed given how cold it was as I could keep my hoodie on until the final 10 minutes before the race.
This year seemed bigger than ever. The announcer said 11,000, though whether that many actually showed up I’m not sure.
My target time was 54 minutes, nearly three minutes ahead of my personal best. It was carefully calculated from the Run Less, Run Faster conversation tables which told me that if I could run a 54-minute 10k, I could do a sub-2 hour half marathon.
However, training has been going really well recently, including taking my Parkrun PB down to 24:37, so I decided to set off fast and slow down when my chest felt like it was going to explode.
As it happens, I managed to avoid this and bring it home in:
49:46
Very chuffed. Well ahead of my target. I had done a sub-50 training run, but it’s always harder on race day because you can never take the perfect line, so you always end up running an additional 100-200 metres with all of the dodging around people and taking corners wide.
I came on to the finishing straight, and Strava told me I had hit 10k with 49:11, giving me 49 seconds to sprint to the actual finish.
Does this mean I can run a sub-2 hour half marathon? Hopefully! It’s not as straightforward as it might seem. The Abbey Dash is very flat while the Leeds Half is almost entirely set on hills. Second, the weather is often very warm in May. But that is certainly the target.
The conversation tables also suggest I can run a sub-4 hour marathon. But I doubt that would be true!
A big shout out to Jane for whom this was her first 10k race. And it was great to grab a beer with Rob, Dr Chris and Elina after the race.
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Tags: 10k, abbey dash, leeds, running
This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2017 at 11:00 am and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.