Annnnnnd we're back to 2013
After that 18K race, it looked like my racing season was all but over. Temperatures were dropping, the weather was getting less and less kind. What you could see in the race report pictures, well these kind of days get to be pretty much the norm around the end of October/beginning of November in Quebec and that indoor race didn't look like much fun. That was until Strava announced the second edition of their Any Way 10K. They've since made it a monthly racing series but back in November, it gave me a purpose to train for a few weeks and try to PR on the 10K distance.
Again, the way it worked with this kind of Strava challenge is you have to log a run that's 10 km or more in distance between two dates (in this case Nov. 18 and 24) and they rank you based on your average pace. Doesn't matter if your run is 10, 15 or 21.1 km long but it's the average pace of the whole run that will count, not the fastest 10 km stretch you run within it.
Again, I turned to my good friend Hal Higdon for a training plan and settled on his advanced 10K plan that I modified just a tiny bit. After one week of recovery following the 18K race, in which I still ran close to 20 miles but all at an easy pace, I had about 4 weeks to train before the ovember 24 deadline so I used weeks 5 to 8 of his plan.
Here's what the original Hal Higdon plan looked like:
And here's what I ended up going with:
I remember that we had a karate competition/seminars weekend at the end of week 8 and I didn't expect to be able to fit in such a hard run, thus putting it in the middle of the week.
Distance were converted from miles to kilometers but I also lowered some distances, interval reps and tempo run duration because I didn't feel ready going to 6 runs a week. In fact, the only week I ran 6 times was the first in that plan.
As you can also see, I had planned a special long run on November 3rd. That's when I did my first half marathon long run. We ended up with a very nice day that Sunday and not only did I go the distance of 21.1, I ended up running for 22.3 km. That was quite a milestone for me, and instrumental in convincing me to try for a half in 2014.
On November 21st, at about 5:20am, I set out to run a warmup K with the idea of gunning it for a 10K PR right after that. And gunning it, I did,
running 10.5 km in 45:24 for an average pace of 4:19/km (6:57/mile). I remember using that 4:19 average pace and figuring out a time of 43:10 as my new PR for a 10K. The feeling was kinda weird though. There I was, alone and panting in the street near our house and nobody to tell it to. I remember being pretty ecstatic about it and telling my wife as I got back home, putting it into perspective to her, comparing my first 10K time of 46:09 to this hypothetical 43:10. She looked impressed and I was proud of myself, that was good enough for a before work kind of celebration.
I entered maintenance mode following that virtual race only to decide to follow a Facebook page's challenge. "I <3 to run" was challenging their followers to run at least a mile every day in December. I started that challenge a couple days early and from November 27th to December 31st, I ran at least a mile for 35 consecutive days and in the process logged my first 200 km month since I started running.
It's also at the beginning of December that I committed to my full plate of racing for the Summer of 2014 but that is for our next installment.
FM