About a week after I completed my TC 10K, I decided that I was going to sign up for the CFB Esquimalt Navy 10K. Since the TC 10K was on April 29th and the CFB Esquimalt 10K was on June 3rd 2012, I knew that there was enough time between the two races for me to both recover and to train harder.
Compared to the CFB Esquimalt 10K, the TC10K had far less hills. When I signed up for the Navy 10K, I had no idea that we were going to have to do that steep hill twice. At the time, the hill seemed brutal.
Even though I knew that it was a much tougher course than the TC 10K, I still set myself a time goal. After all, the Navy 10K would be filled with military men who are in fantastic shape and I admit I was a little bit afraid of embarrassing myself. When I got to the race, I realized that people of all levels were participating, which was great.
I started out near the front of the line because despite knowing that it was a tougher course than the TC10K, I wanted a sub-44 min finish.
However, I took into account what I learned by doing the TC10K, which is not to start out too fast. Knowing that there would be hills in the beginning, the middle and near the end of the race, I started out at a pace that would get me a 44 minute finish if I kept it up.
By the 5th kilometer going at my desired pace, I decided to speed up because I saw a guy just a few meters in front of me. He was going at a really good pace (faster than mine) and I knew that if I caught up to him, chances are in favour of a sub-44 min finish.
I also knew that if I knocked off 3-4 seconds per km for every subsequent kilometer after the 5k mark, then I would probably get a time closer to my TC10K time and possibly even beat it. That thought excited me. At that point, I stopped caring about how tired my legs were and caught up to the guy just in front of me. Then, I passed him. He sped up and passed me. However, I stayed right behind him for the remainder of the race.
He ended up finishing about 2 seconds faster than I did according to the race results.
I ended up being 39th/320 overall, 4/125 woman across the finish line, and 3rd in my age group (out of 30) with a gun time of 43:35. My pace was 4:22/km. I was pretty pleased with this time, but I’m definitely hoping that I can knock off a couple of minutes over the next year.
