Sunday 9 April 2006

Sun 09 Apr 06, Run for the Kids

19km today and for the week so far. 8/9 runs this month & 77/99 runs for the year

Up at 6:15, bowl of porridge with honey and a glass of weak Musashi. Left home about 6:50 to pick up Cam and to make our way into the Dockland area for the first of the AV Winter races and another 20000 supporters of a very good cause. Arrive with loads of time, found Shed 14 which was available for the AV runners and found the Western A' guys and girls. Got my race pack and got my singlet ready and went of for an easy 2k warm up. Some ground stretching and then another small jog to feel very loose. Dropped my bags in the supplied trucks and did the toilet thing.

Ready to go, with a little bit of mucking around at the start as they let the 'blue pack' up too early which made it near impossible for all of the AV runners to fit into the designated area. I had very little expectations of this race as I hadn't been preparing for it, and my long run endurance is quite low. Not a bad day for it, cool with only a light breeze.

A good start, and got into my rythmn quite early, the first 2km were a little fast, but expected so I didn't get pushed over. I slowed down at the 2k which was nearing the Bolte bridge, so the hill also slowed me a bit. Chatting with a few here and there, trying to work out why TB was next to me??? Along the Westgate I concentrated on consistent 4:10 pace. Nearing the Domain tunnel I found myself without close company so I increased my pace to jump back into a nice sized pack. I hit the 10k mark on 41:00 and felt good, so that bloody sub 40 could be closer than I thought, it was here I started to try and work out if it was time to try and increase my pace, but the rise up Swanston St was a little longer than I thought. Finished off fairly strong. Enjoyed the event and thankfully found the remainder of my club mates, eventually and also caught up with heaps of the R4K training participants, who all seemed to be very happy. My run didn't count for AV points today as we didn't fill a second men's team, but I was happy with a time of 1h 0min 16s. Overall happy with limited endurance work.

Splits:
4:00
3:54
4:25
4:15
3:48 (I think maybe short)
4:12
4:09
3:52 (deliberate increase of pace)
4:11
4:10 (10km in 41:00.81)
4:10
4:11
4:12
4:07
2:34 (final 700m)

The link will take you to a picture taken by CR Morley from the top of the Bolte Bridge, I tried to insert the picture but currently not playing the game




6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good effort mate.
Several with Garmins noted 14.11-14.17 km for the course...so a tad short!!!

Sekhmet said...

Did you go thru the Burnley tunnel? Ooh, you're special - you got a different course to the rest of us!

Note to anonymous, most with garmins had them drop out and lose signal thru the domain tunnel so had an inaccurate measure of the distance.

Anonymous said...

Beki,

My Garmin 301 (worn on the upper arm) measured 14.54... the MotionBased GPS plot shows a straight line from the start to end of the tunnel, so it would have measured a bit short there - loss of signal does not exclude the affected distance, just causes the unit to assume a straight line. Strangely, the plot also shows a "kink" before the roundabout at the top of Exhibition Street, which would have added a bit to the measured distance. Other than these discrepancies, the plot fairly closely followed the roads on the map.

R2B said...

Nice run Stu!You were so close to that sub 40 and you didn't realise 'til too late!
Would you have done it different in hindsight?

Cheers R2B

Tesso said...

Well done Stu. Gees, that sub 40min 10k is tatalisingly close.

Ewen said...

Good 10k split Stu! The sub-40 will happen this winter for sure.