Another race and something new

Saturday I did a 10k in Central Park for my fourth qualifying race. This time, it was the Healthy Kidney 10k. According to my trusty Forerunner 205, it took me 1:01:27 to run 6.3 miles, a 9:45/mile pace. The official time was 1:01:29 over 6.2 miles, for 9:55 a mile. Either way, I've done 4 out of the 9 races I'll need in order to qualify for guaranteed entry to the 2010 NYC marathon.

I wasn't even going to go out tonight. I hadn't done anything between the 4 mile race on Sunday and the 10k on Saturday, that stupid IT band thing was hurting, and it was already dark out and my gym was going to close too soon. But, Beth was going to go for a run, and far be it from me to let her beat me, so off I went.

I got dressed to go out in warm clothes, and I was about to go out, when I realized I was dressed from neck to ankle in black at 10:15 pm. Considering how stupid I think pedestrians are when I'm driving and they're dressed all in black at night, I figured I'd better do something about that. It turns out I don't own anything reflective, and there's no way to attach my bicycle lights to my shirt. So I got the yellowest shirt I owned, threw it on top of the black, and headed out. There are plenty of benefits to dressing safely, chiefly not getting hit by a car, but looking good is not one of them.

I did two new things tonight. First, I did the same 2.5 mile loop around Russell Gardens that I've done plenty of times before, but I've always done it clockwise, so I reversed it. It's pretty remarkable how much a route can change just by switching directions. Suddenly you notice inclines that were too slight to feel like downhills when you had done it the other way. I'm pretty sure the uphills were tougher counterclockwise, so between that and and other new thing I did, I modified the loop the second time a keep a little of it a little more flat, but I still kept the biggest hills.

The second new thing I did was that I added sprint intervals. In addition to the last .2 miles, I had 3 quarter mile sprints and one 1/8 mile sprint (only because that section was flat for less distance than I expected). For those I did about 8 min miles, and the rest of the time I did about 9:50 miles, ending up with an average pace of 9:28 over 5 miles. It was definitely not the longest run I've done, but with the inclines and the sprints, it was one of the more challenging runs I've done.