10K on a Chilly Morning

I woke up at about 5am, thanks to my 4 year-old, and lay in bed unable to fall back asleep until my alarm went off at 6:40. Although this normally would not be a very cool thing to have to endure, at least it did allow me to get my run in during the morning before the day got taken over with kid related activities.

It was still dark out, and cold cold cold when I left the house. I guess it's all relative since 1 degree Celsius will feel nice and warm in mid February, but today is still chills the hell out of me. Frost on windshields everywhere!

I worried about how many layers to put on because I wanted to avoid overheating at the end of the run, but also didn't want to freeze during my ten minute warm up walk. I wore three layers on top, a running t-shirt, a "technical" long sleeve, and then a fleece jacket on top, and this seems to have worked well enough for the temperature.

As I started into my run I was definitely feeling a bit stiff, and my legs felt heavy and tired. I don't know why this is since my weekly mileage is not very high, and I haven't done anything extra to tire my legs out, like walking up tonnes of stairs or biking more than my usual 20k a day to work and back home. Perhaps the chiro treatments have something to do with this...

I changed my Garmin setup finally to beep at me each 1km lap, and I started off nice and (what I thought was) slow. The first lap was faster than I thought I was going, and it felt really easy despite the heavy legs. As I continued on I noticed that I was moving pretty well, though I also knew I'd have to drop down into Riverdale West and then climb back out of the Don Valley during the run. As expected the downhill slowed me down (shouldn't it do the opposite???), and the uphill kicked my ass! I'm glad the 10k course at Niagara Falls is flat, and based on today's run I think breaking 50:00 is a realistic goal, though the dream goal of 45:00 is at this point not in danger of being attained. My kilometre lap splits are as follows:

1. 5:28
2. 4:59
3. 4:53
4. 4:50
5. 5:12 (this is where I dropped down into Riverdale Park)
6. 4:56
7. 4:58
8. 4:59
9. 5:49 (this is where I got killed climbing out of the Don Valley)
10. 5:16 (just couldn't recover enough to get close to 5:00/km pace)

Total time for the 10k: 51:24, at an average pace of 5:08/km.

This was a good test for me, and based on the results I should be able to go under 50:00, as mentioned above. Of course, it all depends on how I feel day of, and race conditions, that will determine just how far under 50 minutes I can go. The foot is still tight, but at least I don't feel like I am doing any more damage to it. I have three treatments set up for next week and I am hoping those will loosen things up enough to minimize the pain on race day. After that I am fully intending to take a week off, or maybe even two to let the foot recover completely.

Garmin don't lie.


View Larger Map