Completed the 10K!

Well, it came around a lot faster than I’d expected, and although I wasn’t ready for it (by a long shot) and the rain was pouring down, I took part in the 10KM run at the Standard Chartered Marathon. It went pretty well all things considered, in particular I hit both of my goals:

1. Cross the finish line and don’t die trying
2. Complete it within the 1:40 window of my group
3. My time was 1:34:21

Here are some pics of me making it across the line. Thanks to the Starch Solution you can see that despite the fact I’m far from slim, I’m looking a look better than I did just a few months ago:

Some things I learned

Lots of people walk

This one is not obvious to people who haven’t done this before and even though I’d read about it, I wasn’t sure exactly how it would play out. However, there were people who walked the entire course and never actually did any running. Giving what I’d done to my knees (see below), I walked pretty much most of the course and there were no issues doing that.

Don’t do any running in the days leading up to the race

For me, I knew not to do this but I did it anyway. I knew a week or so before the race that there was no way I was going to make it running a 10K. I can now run a 5K without any trouble, but getting much further is a bit of a challenge. 6K I can do safely, but anything over 7K and I’ll be paying for it over the next few days. So as I couldn’t run a 10K, I thought it would be better to have a strategy. I was thinking I would run 3K, walk 1.5K, run 3K, walk 1.5K and then run the final 1K. So far so good, but I had no idea how fast my walking speed was and whether or not I would risk hitting the 2 hour time limit. I really didn’t want to go to all that trouble only to get pulled from the race and stuck on a bus to drive me to the end. If I was going to turn up, I wanted a least a chance to survive it.

So I decided to give it a go. This was on the Friday, two days before the race. Here’s the irony - the plan worked exactly as I’d hoped. Not only that but it gave me a time of 1:23:00. Unfortunately testing the plan meant I’d pushed myself a little too hard and the next couple of days my knees were pretty bad. This meant that when I walked up to the starting line I was already feeling like I should be sitting down for a rest. I ended up walking with a fair bit of pain (though I did walk pretty fast) throughout the course.

My advice then is don’t do what I did. Make sure you figure this stuff out early and make sure you don’t push yourself too hard.

Just have fun!

It’s a lot of fun and I plan to do it again next year. Although by then I hope I can run a 10K without too much trouble and sticking with the Starch Solution should help me get in shape!