National Road Champs - 10 km

I set my alarm for 6:00 am to make sure I would be ready to leave to pick Nyle up at the airport at 8:00 am. We had a quiet morning watching the running races from my work place across the road from the race and wandered over about 45 min before the race. Nyle showed me how to change the settings on the Garmin which are not mentioned anywhere in the instruction booklet. We decided perhaps it would be better for me to go with auto-laps since I had not practised doing manual laps in a race before.

My race plan was a good warm up, a conservative start and then to try and pick up speed later on if I was close enough to my opponent and doing okay with the judges. My husband phoned about 25 mins before the start so my warm up was not the quality I had planned. (He's out of town and we hadn't spoken for a couple of days).

Shortly into the race I got caught behind two other walkers at about the pace I wanted to walk but decided to pass them on the second lap. One of them stayed with me and proceeded to direct me in how to walk the race for the next 4-5 km. It was very annoying and distracting since it prevented me from settling into the race and finding my own rhythm. I eventually let him go ahead and felt much better for it.

At the 8 km mark I saw I had 2 bent knee penalties so I cut back my speed and concentrated on standing tall and tucking my butt. I was pleased to finish the race with nor further penalites but disappointed in my time (1:02:38). I was looking for a pb of under 61 mins but wasn't close today. The only other competitor in my age group was over 3 minutes ahead and I didn't have it in me today to try and chase that.

For what it was worth here is a link to the data from my Garmin - as Nyle predicted it was way off.

NZ Road Champs 10 km