A new personal 10K best!

Yesterday I ran the Sporting Life 10K here in Toronto. It’s the second-largest race in the country (after the Sun Run in Vancouver), with over 10,000 participants, and as it’s mostly downhill it’s touted as the fastest 10K in the country. So with that in mind I knew I wanted to push myself hard enough to beat my time of 54:36 in the Nike Human Race last August.

It was an early morning to get to the start’the race starts at 8 am’and as we started I made sure to set my watch to start tracking my time. I was aiming for no longer than 5:30 per kilometre and preferably more like 5:10, and I managed to keep my pace in that range at most of the markers as we ran down Yonge Street. My sister was there to cheer me on at about the 5K marker (it’s near her house) and I was at about 26:30 at that point. I usually manage to speed up in the last few kilometres so I was confident at that point that I was running my fastest 10K ever.

I tried to push harder after the 7K mark but unfortunately, I started running out of fuel at the same time. I didn’t have enough breakfast and I was feeling it. I made it past the finish line through sheer will, with a final time of 52:30, and while I’m pleased with the time and how hard I worked, I can’t help thinking that if I’d eaten better I could have pushed harder. Lesson learned: next time, pay more attention to pre-race fuel.

The next race I’m signed up for is a 10-miler in July, but I don’t know if I can wait that long, so I think I’m going to head out of town next month for the Waterloo Classic and see if I can push myself to another personal best.

Did you run Sporting Life, or have you run another race recently? How did you do?

View all of Kat’s running posts on the Half-marathon diaries home page.

Don’t miss a single Best Health Blog post’subscribe today via RSS or email!