Race date: 21.4.2012
Official Finishing Time: 1:08:08.6 gun time, 1:07:25.3 chip time (PB)
Official Position: 75/2735 (finishers), which puts me in the fastest 2.74%
Race number: 2250

The Tar Heel 10-miler in the familiar surroundings of the Chapel Hill campus was only my second race this year, and the first time tackling the 10-mile distance. I’ve been wanting to have a go at a 10-miler for a while as I thought it would be a nice distance to race — especially since a good proportion of my training runs are around 10 miles. However, I knew this was going to be a hilly course, around the campus, and my preparation for the race was perhaps the worst ever. At any rate, this has to count as a PB, as it was my debut on the distance.

In ideal circumstances I should be able to get fairly close to 60min for ten miles, or at least to around 63min based on my 10k PB (37:41). I never thought I’d be able to pull that off in this race, but I was still hoping to do a little bit better. 65:xx would’ve been nice. I was in fact on for something like that until 8km, clinging on to the 6:30min/mile pacer (which was a positive surprise), but then the rolling course started to get to me and by 9 miles, when I hit Laurel Hill, I was done for. No huge surprises though, I didn’t get any race specific training in for this one. Weather was good however — mostly overcast and not too hot — so that’s not an excuse. the 5am wakeup for a 7:30am start might be… Well, it was good to get racing again, and I’m motivated to get some proper training in for a change now!

There may be photos from the race forthcoming, check back later.

A few notes about the race organization. First the negatives:

• No sports drinks before, during, or after the race.
• No food in the goodie bag or after the race.
• No goodies in general!
• The men’s “small” T-shirt is more like XXL, as usual, and it’s just a basic cotton shirt.
• Quite expensive ($45).
• And the worst thing: the course had been designed so that the additional 4-mile race clashed with the 10-miler and the fast 10-mile runners hit a wall of 4-mile joggers and walkers around the 8 mile marker!

Fortunately there were some positives too:

• The course is nice, even if it’s rather hilly!
• The start and the finish were quite well organized.
• 6:30min/mile pacer! Usually you don’t get such fast pacers.
• Well marshalled, and the aid stations were functional.
• Immediate race results on a printout, as well as live updates online.

Some more data from the Garmin:

Splits:
1k 4:02.0
2k 3:49.1
3k 4:00.2
4k 4:00.8
5k 4:09.3
6k 4:00.5
7k 3:59.9
8k 4:11.1
9k 4:11.0
10k 4:24.5
11k 3:44.3
12k 4:16.4
13k 4:12.9
14k 4:38.2
15k 4:46.0
16k 4:20.4
Total: 16,35k in 1:08:10,7

Just about decent until 8k, as you can see. The 11th lap had a long downhill section, so got back to speed there, but then the worst uphill bit follows soon after.

Well, that’s about it. There’s a 15k trail race coming up in just under two weeks. I’m still considering whether I want to do it, as my priority should now be to get back to training and clock some good 60+ mile weeks with long runs. But I might just do it as a training run, we’ll see.

Official results here (PDF).
Garmin data here.