Been busy

It's been a while since I've posted, but I'm still here and training hard.

In fact I've had two great weeks of training and despite not turning in a great race on Sunday, I feel I'm making progress.

I've also been golfing, as spring has finally arrived here in the Great White North....well at least here in Ottawa anyway. So with work and family commitments, it's been difficult to find time to blog. But tonight I finally have a few free minutes to post an update.

As I said, training has been very good the last couple of weeks, I'm even enjoying and making progress with the strength training sessions Ian introduced. So I was feeling very confident and strong going into the 10k race on Sunday, but for some reason I just didn't have "it" that day.

It was a perfect day for running - sunny, about 8C and just a little wind, although it was a head wind for the first part of the race. I felt good and had a great warm-up session. I was confident I could PR and even post a time under 40 minutes.

I started strong and was sticking to my plan to run the first 3 kilometres at a pace between 3:55 and 4:00 minutes per kilometre. Then at about the 4k mark it was as if I hit a wall! My legs felt like lead weights and I was unable to get back to a sub-4 minute pace the remainder of the race.

I couldn't even hold my half marathon pace from January of 4:16 per km. I finished with a time of 42:45, an average pace of 4:17 per km, putting me 22nd overall and 10th in my age group. It was disappointing to miss my goal time by approximately 3 minutes and more than a minute and a half slower than my previous best at the 10k distance.

I can't explain why I sucked so much, but I'm over it now and ready to move on. I guess I have to accept the fact that you can't PR in every race, even if you feel you should.