Dick Wedlock Memorial 10K

This was my first 10K since the start of the year, an invitational race in Pollok Park for firefighters and a few running clubs. A start time of 1pm meant a late breakfast and no lunch. It was very warm although I expected the trees in the park would offer some shade. The course was two laps mostly within the park and was fairly flat. As ever, the plan was to run 3:30 per kilometre, with the overall goal of running inside 36 minutes, and this pace put me in 3rd place from the start. I started to speed up a little after the 1K mark and went through 3K on about 10:24 which compared pretty well with 10:08 for a straight 3K on Tuesday, but then I began to slow down slightly and by the 5K mark I was just outside my goal pace. Some time around the 4K mark it had started to pour, which may actually have helped a bit in the conditions, and I also took advantage of the water station at the halfway point as my mouth was feeling quite dry.

On the second lap, the second-placed runner (also a Garscube Harrier) was quite far in the distance and I wasn't sure how far ahead I was of fourth. Between 7K and 8K I made a terrible mistake and missed a sharp left turn. When I couldn't see anyone ahead of me on a fairly straight road I looked back and saw an arrow I had missed. To make matters worse, just after I turned round my number fell off and I stopped to pick it up - although it turned out I needn't have bothered as most of the competitors finished without theirs. I could see the fourth-placed runner just behind me as I rejoined the course. The incident probably cost me between 10 and 15 seconds and was fairly demoralising. I now faced a battle to finish inside 36 minutes, and I felt like I was running very slowly. I went through 9K in 32:30 which meant I had to improve on my target pace in the last kilometre, and this seemed like a tall order. When I turned the corner towards the running track at Lochinch I dared to look back and saw I was probably safe in third place, although when I reached what should have been the 300m starting point on the (unmarked) track my time was 35:13 and I thought there was no way I would manage sub-36. Then I noticed that the finishing line was actually halfway down the home straight and I managed a kick for the last 100m or so to finish in 35:59, an average of 5:47 per mile. This knocked 15 seconds off my time from December although it should really have been 25 or 30.

My prize for third place was a New Balance t-shirt (in addition to the t-shirt I got for taking part) and a discount voucher for a sports massage. We also won the team prize and each received a bottle of wine. I don't think I've won a prize in a road race (other than Garscube events) since I was second in an 8K in Belarus in 2005.

After the race I took advantage of the running track to try to calibrate my SportBand. I ran 5 laps in 7:21 which wasn't too bad under the circumstances. The SportBand reckoned this was 1.08 miles which is of course somewhat short of 2K. Unfortunately, the run turned out not to be usable for calibration for some reason.