One-hour track race

My left leg has been feeling stiff and sore and I was tempted not to go to this event. The race walking fraternity in NZ is not high in numbers so I like to support as many events as possible. After sitting in the car for almost two hours from home to the track in Palmerston North I could barely walk at all. I did a few laps but seemed to be on about 7:30 pace or worse. We got there well before the event so I rubbed some of my magic emu oil ointment into my legs and got myself prepared then went out and id another three laps.

When the race started I was surprised to find myself able to keep 2:24 lap pace for the first 4 laps and the first 2 km in under 12 minutes. My pace then dropped back to 2:30 laps and then to 2:35 but I was pretty consistent in pace. I had a few warning in laps 3 - 6 but felt I was walking well so I wasn't too concerned. Sometime after the 5 km mark I noticed I had one penalty but I concentrated on my style and thought I was doing okay. There was no change for 4 or 5 laps then at about 7.5 km I noticed two more cards had gone up. I decided that I may as well go for my time goal since I could not say I slowed down to get past the judges. I thought the gold standard for my age group was 9.6 km and with 10 minutes to go I completed 8 km. That meant I had to do 2:30 laps for the next four laps, 5 seconds a lap faster than my current pace. I dug it in and achieved a final distance of 9.65 km. This turned out not to be the gold standard but it was of no consequence - I had achieved the 9.6 km I was aiming for.

The laps are a little odd since I set the watch to auto-lap each pass of the start/finish. It showed that the watch was not that accurate and pressing the lap button myself would have been better.

One-hour track race