It felt like it’s been so long since I last ran, that I’d forgotten where my feet were (I did manage to find them, one at the end of each leg). It was actually last Thursday evening so six days ago but I usually leave a gap of no more than two or three days so it felt like a long time. I’d planned a speed run for last Friday then the HUHM on the Sunday. However, I came down with some sort of bug on Friday morning. I felt OK when making breakfast but, by the time I’d sat down to eat it, I really didn’t feel like eating. So, Friday and Saturday were spent on the couch. Sunday morning I felt fine. No idea what it was, I tested negative on a flow test so I really don’t know. I toyed with the idea of doing the HM on the Sunday but thought better of it.
Which brings me to today (Wednesday) when I finally headed out for the HUHM 10K! Suppose I could complain that it wasn’t sunny but at 7pm on a November evening, I think that’s the way that it goes. Temperature was fine and it was dry so pretty good conditions. I started off at an easy pace / effort (although the start is downhill so my pace here wasn’t that different to the rest of the run). The 2nd k is flatter so I did better at a slow pace there. I then let my pace ease up to something that seemed about right then just aimed to hold on to that pace for the rest of the race. It’s a strategy that I’ve used on longer races and it seems to work OK provided I’ve allowed enough time to recover from previous runs. Looking at the splits on Strava, my first 2k were the slowest, the next 7k were about average and my last k was about 25 seconds quicker than the others so I’m happy with that.
My time for 10K was 55:32 which is about a minute slower than my PB (set running the HUHM Virtual 10K in the spring). I’m planning on running the HM on Friday so should be submitting another report then.