Beaches Jazz Fest 10k Tune Up Race

July 25th 2010

The night before I didn’t feel nervous at all, it was just a run. I drank a ton of water, even though my ever so loving husband kept encouraging me to have a beer with him while watching Dr. Who. I went to bed at my normal time with plans to wake up at 6am.

Which I did and realized I apparently was nervous. I got up checked the weather for the last time and had breakfast and a coffee. Finished packing up my bag and ready to head out. I headed out and was at the race start/finish just 10 minutes before the 20k group was leaving at 8:30am. So before I got my bib number I decided to watch them take off. Even though there was an hour before the 10k start time, I wasn’t the only one with the idea to get there super early. So I got my bib number and decided to find a place to hang out while I waited. Thankfully I had brought a book to read for a while. 30 minutes to the start time I grabbed the bathroom which there was no line for (wohoo) and then checked my bag. As it got closer to the start time I was able to see that there was almost twice as many people doing the 10 as there was doing the 20k. I ran into a buddy of mine and said hello just before we lined up to start. This wasn’t a chipped or well timed race but I had my garmin with me so I decided to go by that since the clock they did have was started an hour ago when the 20k group started.

We did the countdown and off we went. The path we were on was a good size so there wasn’t too much tripping over anyone going on. It was encouraged to just use this as a training run and to not go too crazy which I decided to follow and took it easy. The 1km marker came and I was going well. The sky was cloudy and being practically on the beach meant a little breeze. The majority of the route was on the Martin Goodman trail which was open to the public during this race, but thankfully it seemed most people decided to avoid it. Around 2k there was a water station and since I had brought my own water I passed by it. There were no more markers till the 5k turnaround point, so I used my watch to take a quick walk break around 3k. Around the 4k point we were getting the first real wave of 20k runners heading back. So the pathway was getting really crowded and there were a lot of runners almost running on others since there was no room to pass, unless you wanted to hit people on the way back. We hit the turnaround point and I managed to keep going till the next water station where I took another walk break to have a drink, this time I grabbed some Gatorade since I was sweating so much and starting to feel tired. I remember looking up and seeing the clouds start to clear and just thinking that it needs to hold out till we’re done. I doubt I would be able to keep it up with the sun blasting down on me. We hit the 8k marker and I felt the need to finish, Just to keep it up since it would be over soon. Once I hit the last marker at 9k I just kicked it up a couple notches. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull a -1:00 partly because an ambulance was on the path (I think another runner got too dehydrated I think) and we had to go around it and the people on the board walk, but I could get it on the hour mark. I keep up the quicker pace and did a touch of weaving to cross the finish line at 1:00:32.

My pace splits

1km: 6:13
2km: 5:49
3km: 6:08
4km: 6:07
5km: 6:19
6km: 6:11
7km: 6:07
8km: 6:19
9km: 6:01
10km: 5:31