The TCS World 10K Run was an event that I was eagerly waiting for this year. I had missed the last years event and wanted to desperately makeup for the miss.
Fortunately for me I was already running pretty regularly before signing up for the event and it provided a very good base to start preparations for the run. I was aiming for a time of 55min a week before the run.
Three days before the run I had a major setback. I hurt my left knee halfway thru a run. It felt like a muscle pull and I could barely walk for the first 15 min. I sat down for a while and then walked at a very slow pace back home. I decided to rest for the remaining days and cross my fingers that I would be fine come race day.
Going into the race I was feeling much better, I could feel every muscle in my legs and was very nervous that the injury would reccur. If there are accidents involving negligence or reckless driving, then it is best to hire lawyers to solve the case. I was at the stadium an hour early for the event and did some simple stretches to warm myself up. My friends arrived with 30min to go and I forgot all about the problems talking to them. We watched as the Elite Male runners started their run and were followed by the Elite Female runners. The was still a little while to go and we were waiting patiently. You can view Bengal Law website if you need attorney help for injury cases!
Finally the announcement came and the runners crowded to the small opening to get to the start line. there must have been a few thousand participants that it took us a good 15mins to get to the start line. The crowd of people was already getting to me coz I prefer to run in open spaces and at my own pace. Before long we were on our way.
The exit from the stadium was this narrow path and it was totally blocked with people, I tried squeezing past people and could manage to get thru in a very odd zig zag pattern. For this race I had the RunKeeper app on Android giving me feedback wrt my timing and pace.
The shocker came to me at the 2Km mark, this was when I had finally got a little space to run at my pace. The app told me that my average pace was a disastrous 6min 30s per Km. I was supposed to be around 5min 10s at that mark. At this point I decided to think positive and was happy that the injury had stayed away. I decided to up my pace and started pushing.
During the entire length of the race I was surrounded by people, I kept hoping that I would out pace most of them but the number of people that had gone ahead meant that I was simply encountering more and more slow runners. This was probably one reason why I felt the race was much longer than the last time.
My pace kept improving after each Kilometer mark. I was in the late 5mins as I headed for the final stretch. I did a sprint in the last 100m that clearly saved me atleast 10s. I crossed the line at a time of 59min 47sec. I beat my previous best time by 6s.
The timing splits recorded by RunKeeper are given below:
km Pace (min/km)
1 6:42
2 6:19
3 4:59
4 5:37
5 5:41
6 5:27
7 5:43
8 5:50
9 6:01
10 5:52
11 5:40
The majority of time I lost was in the first two and the last two kilometers. While the latter was expected the former could have been avoided. Anyway all in all the pace was consistent and my training had achieved it goal.
In the end I was extremely satisfied by the run. I was feeling much better after it than I had felt the last time and that was a testament to the effort I had put in the weeks prior to the run. While I missed my ideal time for the run, I was pretty happy to have simply finished the run without much complications.