Great Eastern Women 10k 2008 Race Report

Good news first. I made it through all 10k without walking! Woo hoo! Bad news, I didn't do the run under an hour.

I woke up bright and early yesterday morning and had a banana and some dried cranberries. I made sure I drank a whole bunch of water the whole Saturday and I drank a whole lot more after I woke up. Yes, I realise I do have an unhealthy obsession with being constantly hydrated.

My running mate who I'd never actually run with before, G, picked me up in a cab and we headed on our merry way. I have never seen so many women in one place. Nor have I seen so many people wake up at some godforsaken hour in the morning just to run.

After dropping our knickknacks at the baggage counter, we went off trying to figure out how to get the running chip on our shoe. Needless to say we probably tied it completely wrongly, but what's most important was that it stayed on the whole run, and that it did.

Because G and I hadn't run together before and G hadn't run 10k before this, we compared our individual pace when warming up and agreed that I'd tuck myself behind her for the first 5k and then we'd switch for the next 5k. Brilliant idea since I always tend to start off stupidly fast and end up getting tired and miserable about 4k through.

Apart from there being tons and tons of people (we chose to start somewhere in the middle), I thought we did pretty good for the first half of the run. G was keeping at a good comfortable steady pace and that worked out really well. I grabbed a powerade at the 5k drinks station (after fighting off a few women who were shoving others to get their drinks) and decided to pick up the pace a little.

By now I had more or less lost G amongst the masses of women, because unlike me, she isn't crazily paranoid about being dehydrated and she didn't actually stop once throughout the run to get any drinks. So I was flying solo. I tried to pick up the pace a bit now and wasn't completely winded, so kept at that for a while. At about 7.5k, I grabbed some water and decided to push the pace a little bit more because I figured I could. Not good, I started getting a little floored at this stage, so held back again.

I hardly remember the last 1k. My shoulders were aching, I had a stitch, I was thirsty, I was tired...all I wanted was for everything to end. I vaguely recall making a mad dash for the finish in the last 500m, more because I wanted everything to be over than actually thinking I'd make better time. G came in about 4 minutes after me, despite having walked from the 8k mark to the 9k mark. Just goes to show how slowly I was running then.

So there, my first 10k race, which I didn't complete under an hour, but yet strangely there's a sense of accomplishment that I haven't felt in a while. I conquered the 10k without dying, and that left a sweet sweet taste in my mouth.

Race Time: 1:09:47
(956th out of 3900 people...which is within the top 25 percentile...anything to make myself feel better!)