Bushy Park 10k

This post is quite possibly overkill, since pretty much everyone who reads this blog will have read my multiple tweets on this subject.

I ran my second 10k race today in Bushy Park.

I ran my previous (and first) 10k in 1:00:10. When I started training for this run at the beginning of the year, I was hoping to get around a 50:00 time. That may have been slightly overambitious. At any rate, I certainly overtrained. Towards the end of last month, I was feeling a lot of pain in my butt and hips. Turns out it was piriformis syndrome. I spent a a week and a half not running at all and another two weeks running on a elliptical trainer and then a treadmill.

I spent the week before the race road running again. Mostly taking it easy, so as not to injure myself again. Given that I had spent time out being injured, I'd revised my expectations. I was hoping to run the 10k in 55:00.

The race went fairly well. I knew I was pushing myself hard, and had to adjust my pace a few times before I hit my stride. After about 5k, my back was feeling a bit tight, but that seemed to disappear after I concentrated on my breathing for a while. At the end of the race, my watch showed 52:36. When the results (284KB Word file) came in, my official time was 52:45 -- over a seven minute improvement over my last 10k time. I'm pretty pleased with that.

Still, I'm hoping my next 10k will be a sub-50. I'm thinking the trick will be not to overtrain.