A Tale of Two 10Ks

Recently I joined up with Baltimore Road Runners Club (BRRC) to get a little speed work in with their middle distance training group.  The group works out Thursday nights up at Goucher college (they finally put in a new track!) as well as some long runs Saturday mornings at Loch Raven Reservoir. The main focus has been to get my pace to start dropping and we've been using about a 7 min/5K pace as a baseline for all the workouts.

So far I'm happy enough with my progress that I put it to a little test by doing 2 separate 10Ks in the same week.  Not exactly A-type races but would give me both an idea of where I stand and some race experience being tired (which I'm ALWAYS tired at the end of an Olympic tri) so a definite fun time.

Too Hot To Trot

The first race was put on by BRRC themselves on the NCR Trail.  This one was called Too Hot To Trot which was definitely not the case.  Many of the scrawny runners were all shivering before the start as it was an oddly chill morning.  My goal was to negative split this race.  Go out fairly strong but not too hard and able to come home relatively strong.  My full result is below from Stava:

PR!!!

I cannot really argue with getting a PR, but haven't really executed any 10Ks lately so this was almost a guarantee.  Looking at my splits you'll see the full story:

So I went out a little too hard (its tough when you have a lot of fit racers at the start with you) but overall I was fairly happy with my overall time.  Not a bad little race.  I finished that up with an additional couple miles to make this a "long run Sunday" and close out my day.

Triad 10K

The second race took place at APG, MD the Wed after Too Hot so I had a couple days to recover and put together another run.  The difference this time was that prior to the 6:15AM race there was a 2K Kids Color Run that I decided to run with little JoePa (he's 2) beforehand.  I'm going to call that "run" more of a Crossfit type workout since I was basically doing short jogs while lifting a 33lb oddly shaped medicine ball over at random intervals.  So that was my warm up before the actual race.

Same race plan as the previous 10K only to TRY and go out a bit easier...

Not too bad given how I've been feeling in training and being a little earlier than I was expecting.  My splits show the reduced effort.  Still need to work on coming home harder though:

So one week of two 10Ks with similar results I think I'm seeing some decent progress and looking forward to coming home strong in my next Olympic tri in early September.

Thanks for reading!