Levelland Lope

Way behind on posting.  This one will be a short one so I'll just get it done.

Cathy and I ran in the Levelland Lope 10K run this past Saturday.  This was my first 10K ever so no matter what it was going to be a personal record for me.  In the past a 10K has always been way too long of a run for me to even think about trying to run one, but after the last year and a half marathon under my belt, a 10K seemed pretty short.

I really didn't have any expectations for how I was going to do, I've been working on my low heart rate training and wasn't even sure if I was going run in a race or not this summer, but the running club races are only $5 to enter so I figured I might as well get a few of them in.  Based on my half marathon time, the online running calculators were saying I should be able to run a 52 minute 10K, but that doesn't take into account that my half marathon was run under near perfect weather conditions and on a Saturday in June in West Texas the only thing for sure was that the weather conditions would not be near perfect.

The course was pretty flat and the weather wasn't terrible though, so I was hoping to finish somewhere around that mark.  Race morning broke with the temperature at 65 degrees with 90% humidity and a 15 mph South wind.  Not a very big crowd for this race as it was a 30 mile drive from Lubbock, but we had a decent start.  Here we are at the start, I'm 205 and Cathy is just behind me wearing bib 204.  I forget that I'm a little different body type than your average runner until I look through pictures of the start of some of these races. 

Pacing was pretty good for the first 4 miles.  My splits were 8:30, 8:18, 8:32 & 8:37, but at about the 4.2 mile mark the course turned back into the wind and it felt like it had picked up some from earlier and mile 5 clocked in at a 9:12 pace and mile 6 was a 8:49 pace with about 1/4 mile of that into the wind as well.  My heart rate was pretty good throughout and I didn't feel like I was really going all out or anything, I pushed in the last .2 miles with a 7:38 pace and was clicking along at a 6:30 pace right there at the end. The club photographer was taking pictures right around the 6 mile mark and I was still feeling good enough to give a thumbs up as I ran by.

Cathy lost her hair band in the wind coming back so I couldn't get approval to post her picture with her hair flying in her face, but she wasn't too far behind me and had a smile on her face as well.

I ended up finishing in 54:12 for an official pace of 8:45 per mile, and Cathy ended up with a 56:26 for a 9:06 pace.  Our friend Larry finished 3rd overall with a 38:15 time and an average pace of 6:10 per mile!

We had a good time and it was nice to get a race in.  I'm back on my heart rate shuffle and it's not looking like the race had any negative affect on my base building work so that's good too.  I ran the 6 mile route at the house yesterday in 1:06:04 for an average pace of 10:54 per mile and an average heart rate of 137 bpm so that is my fastest MAF run yet.  It probably didn't hurt that I spend the first part of the week at 7,000' elevation and then came back and ran at 3,000' the next morning though. 

I need to get some other posts done soon, but at least this one is fairly current. 

Nathan