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Ellicott City 10K
Sep. 19th, 2021 12:14 pmWhew! It has been a while since I posted an entry here, but I have been keeping my race results updated all along and figured I might as well post a race update. I just ran the Ellicott City 10K in my new little town this morning. This is the second in person race I have run since the pandemic, and because I am technically training for the half-marathon in Baltimore in a few weeks, I am using this as a training run/time trial. This means there was no proper taper and I've been doing much longer runs than one would need to for a 10k. (I ran 19k last week).
However, what's special about this race is that it covers areas that I know well because i regularly run on them (the uphill part) and so it was a chance to test my conditioning on these hills and my race strategy. The course is a loop run twice where the first 2K are long downhills. This means it's easy to go too fast and burn out so you're dying on the 3K of mostly uphills.
I had done a 10K in July and found myself really running out of energy at the end. This was probably due in part to it being hotter and humid in July than it is now, but also to the fact that I ran the first half too hard. So today I held back on the first half to run a negative split (the second 5K faster than the first 5K) and my goal was to run against myself and not try to beat people. I mentioned to my husband beforehand that I wasn't sure I would place but that I thought I could get in the top 5 of women overall.
And I was right! I finished exactly in 5th place overall women and 2nd in my age group (40-49). What was really impressive was that the overall winner of the 10k was a woman, so she was extremely fast. My time was 49:42, which happened because I did in fact run a negative split (first 5k was 25:01 and second was faster at 24:22). I'm really happy my race strategy held and I was able to finish relatively strong. As it turns out, the 4th place woman finished just two seconds ahead of me. I had been gaining on her over the last two kilometers (all uphill) but didn't not manage to have enough in me to catch her. However, that's okay. This was meant to be a training run and not a peak race, and I still have to do a second run later today!
However, what's special about this race is that it covers areas that I know well because i regularly run on them (the uphill part) and so it was a chance to test my conditioning on these hills and my race strategy. The course is a loop run twice where the first 2K are long downhills. This means it's easy to go too fast and burn out so you're dying on the 3K of mostly uphills.
I had done a 10K in July and found myself really running out of energy at the end. This was probably due in part to it being hotter and humid in July than it is now, but also to the fact that I ran the first half too hard. So today I held back on the first half to run a negative split (the second 5K faster than the first 5K) and my goal was to run against myself and not try to beat people. I mentioned to my husband beforehand that I wasn't sure I would place but that I thought I could get in the top 5 of women overall.
And I was right! I finished exactly in 5th place overall women and 2nd in my age group (40-49). What was really impressive was that the overall winner of the 10k was a woman, so she was extremely fast. My time was 49:42, which happened because I did in fact run a negative split (first 5k was 25:01 and second was faster at 24:22). I'm really happy my race strategy held and I was able to finish relatively strong. As it turns out, the 4th place woman finished just two seconds ahead of me. I had been gaining on her over the last two kilometers (all uphill) but didn't not manage to have enough in me to catch her. However, that's okay. This was meant to be a training run and not a peak race, and I still have to do a second run later today!
