Neder Nederland 10K

My run today at Nederland represented as close to peak as I've had so far in my runs. That readiness allowed me to meet an important goal of my training--to arrive at a point where my fitness level would produce a sub-60 minute 10K.

To have done it at an elevation of 8600 ft, with a 2.5 mile uphill climb at the beginning, has given me a great sense of personal satisfaction. And shown me in clear terms that regular running does indeed produce results.

(In a sidenote that I'll elaborate on further in another journal entry, if I had ever thought of running as a way of losing weight I would be quitting this week. More later.)

My strategy for these runs has been to start out on the slow side, within easy comfort in my HR, build in the middle of the run and finish strong. For the reader who is interested in what this means--and has a sense of numbers--I've produced a table of my HR monitor readouts, per mile.

I'm enjoying studying these numbers and learning from the patterns they represent. My first reaction is one of validation for pacing myself with the HR monitor rather than setting pace/mile goals. With the elevation of this course and the uphill terrain at the outset, I'd have been completely out of my league to have attempted to run 9-minute miles right out of the gate--and destroyed any chance at all of finishing strong.

Even in the relatively constant terrain of the last 3.5 miles, it's also clear that there is not a strictly linear relationship between HR and pace--I increased my HR but my time/mile actually decreased. At least at my present level of training and experience, fatigue and heat introduce some fairly significant inefficiencies. Clearly, if I had attempted to maintain the same HR throughout the run, my times would have slowed down.

In my first 10K, two years ago, I finished with a lot of energy and breath left--I didn't really know how much to save for the end, thinking all along I was going to hit some kind of wall that would knock me flat on my back. I also hadn't yet discovered the HR monitor.

Today I used it all up. For each of the miles I felt like I was pushing fairly hard--sucking wind at that elevation--and the last quarter mile my pace was at close to 95% of my maximum HR. I was in enough of a zone that I wasn't even aware of the announcer saying a couple of kind and encouraging words for me as I struggled to maintain my all-out pace to the finish line. I heard about them later from Claudia, who was doing her own cheering from the sidelines. Though I was unconscious of them at the time, it pleases me now to know they were there.

And of course, unmonitored by the band across my chest, my heart was on a parallel track of gratitude, almost bursting with the joy of being among friends--happy to have Jen Bray along today--and healthy strangers, listening to the gurgling stream alongside a ribbon of road winding across the top of a mountain, the early hint of autumn in the air, crisp blue skies overhead.

A person has to learn to live with Bliss, too.