2014 Nile Ten Mile

While my darling busied herself in the kitchen and garden I took to the Bike Track to run a mock version of last Sunday's fun run - and a fun run it was too!

I set my Garmin GPS to record miles rather than kilometres and found that it was so much more difficult to run in miles - perhaps because the intervals are so much further apart and I am not used to them. Anyway, I wanted to run at about 10 mins/mile and started off at exactly that pace. However, the next mile was run at 9.14 and from there until the end of 7th mile I was running at around 9.20-9.40/mile. At that point  I was feeling the pinch of some fast running so that the next miles were 9.59 and 10.20 with the 10th mile run in 9.27 as I pushed it to the finish line. In the actual race this would have put me in 44th position out of 55 runners - though in an actual race with competition I might have been able to hold a more consistent pace.

Towards the end I passed two young women who were walking and one of them had the following on the back of her top: "Why walk when you can run." I comment that it was an interesting slogan and they both gave a half laugh.

Anyway, I was very pleased with my effort as it was 59.70 secs faster that my previous best over this course back in 2011. The pleasing aspect of this time was that it was an average of 6.02/k, so I went awfully close to being under the 6 min/k barrier. If it hadn't been for the slower 9th mile, run into an increasing headwind then I might have done that as well.  There is always next year - and some more mock versions of other fun runs later in this year.

Who knows, but I might even be able to finally get around to running a marathon distance!