Race Report: Joe K 10K

Not only was this the first race I completed in 2020, this was my first race since 2018. It was also my longest run in quite a while. 

I’m happy to report it was also one of my best overall race experiences yet. 

Nothing got in the way. I got a decent night’s sleep and woke up right before my alarm was set to go off. The weather was better than expected. Trains ran on time. Lines were minimal and moved quickly. Most people seemed in good spirits, and no one was an asshole. Technology worked. This all made it easier to just focus on being in good spirits myself, and doing the best I could to manage what I could control myself.

I readied my things the night before, laying out the outfit I wanted to wear and putting the items I would want to leave in bag drop into the provided clear bag. As there was rain in the forecast, I had even put my dry change of clothes in freezer bags to ensure they would be dry no matter what. 

I woke up at 5:45 and made myself coffee and oatmeal, giving myself plenty of time to enjoy my breakfast before I had to get to the subway. After putting on my layers, I poured myself a travel mug of tea, donned my headphones and started a playlist to help me get in the zone as I headed out the door. 

I used the subway ride to think about the race, breathing deeply any time I started to feel nervous or excited. I focused on my intentions: manage my energy so that I would feel like I neither held back too much nor burned myself out too badly – and finish ready to recover and do another workout the next day. This is, after all, only the first of many races on my calendar this year.

The 5-minute walk from the subway station to bag drop in Central Park worked as nice pre-warm-up. I dropped my bag, made a quick restroom stop, and then did a quick jog/walk to the start as a warm-up. I was in corral K, which both added a little distance to the trip and gave me a chance to do some drills while shuffling to the actual start line after the gun went off. 

Unless people are being grumpy or weird, I leave my headphones off while in the corrals. I find that at running races, people are typically only inclined to speak to their friends, but I enjoy the sort of passive sense of community as you stand in the chilly fog with a bunch of other people who paid for the privilege to get up early on a Saturday to run a well-trodden loop through a public park. I also get a chuckle out of the people who hold their watches in the air and look up as though that helps their GPS reception. 

Around 8:11am, I approached the chip timers at the start, hit play on my playlist, started my Garmin, and immediately started telling myself to stay in my own body rather than getting too caught up in the energy of those around me. I check my watch for my pace more often at the beginning of a race, since so many people bolt out of the start line – and I know I’m not fully warmed up yet. 

It was pretty crowded so I tried to simply focus on my cadence and keeping my breathing steady and calm. Once warmed up and we hit the first few hills at the north end of the park, I was able to start leaning into finding a slightly less comfortable but also sustainable zone. My coach has had me thinking about my cadence in some of my recent training runs, and that helped a lot, especially as I encountered more hills than my training on the very flat West Side Highway has afforded. 

For the remainder of the race, I was generally around an 86rpm cadence and had my heart rate between 165 and 170, with a couple of spikes up to 175. I was pretty confident that was the right heart rate for me for roughly an hour, and expected that would leave just enough energy for me to bump it up a bit at the finish. I figured if I was wrong and I started to hit a wall, it would come late enough that I wouldn’t end up with too shameful a performance. As for cadence, I hope to improve throughout the season to get to 90rpm over the coming months, but I was really happy at this point to be pretty much an 86rpm metronome until the last mile or so. 

I felt good throughout the race. I felt strong in my core, and it feels nice to feel like I’ve found the sweet spot where I am pushing sustainably. My smile spread throughout and I at least felt like, if anything, my form improved as my confidence grew. I felt experienced and strong. It was a nice feeling. 

This all culminated in the last mile. As hoped, my energy management plan – and training – worked well. As the first 5 miles had gone well, I’d devised a plan to treat the last mile as an “envelope run” similar to the assignment my coach had given me earlier in the week: find the edge of my comfort zone and push to hold it. I kept focused on cadence and holding my core while relaxing my shoulders and jaw. I tried not to look at my watch much, but the data shows my cadence came up to a nice, steady 88-90rpm during that mile, and my heart rate gradually increased over that mile from the lower 170s to my max (about 190). I crossed the finish line at a 7min/mile pace – which is quite fast for me. For comparison, my fastest 400m intervals during a recent training run were just a touch faster than pace.

As this race didn’t involve medals or fanfare, I grabbed a couple of waters and a bagel, made my way to collect my bag from bag drop and enjoyed a cool-down walk to the subway station. I and quite a few others stretched while waiting for the train – and continued our stretching once aboard like good Subway Creatures. 

In reflecting, some things I could have optimized: 

• The weather ended up being more mild than forecasted and I could have packed lighter for my bag drop bag. Then again, I’d rather find I had a bit extra than to be freezing during the 40-minute journey home.
• Similarly, more layers/optionality in my race outfit would have worked well. The main issue was that I had built the base for worse weather overall (the original forecast). Next time I should remember not to trust the forecast and have a couple of options to choose from in the morning based on the actual situation. Then again, the weather actually got worse over the course of the race, so even if I had started with less, it would have been smart to have a spare layer to throw on when the fog turned to mist if I’d done so.
• I prefer my Flip Belt to the race belt that I have that will hold a bib. As this was not a triathlon with a transition, and I ended up using pins to secure the bottom of the bib anyway, there was no advantage to using the race belt so I should just pin the bib in future running-only races – and/or get a better race belt.
• I should have packed something with protein for a recovery snack, along with a bottle of water. This would have been better than what they provided in the finisher chute, and expedited my exit. And/or researched the nearest coffee shop where I could have grabbed a latte and a nibble for the ride home.
• Having a go-to running playlist on random worked fine, but it’s nice to have one custom-made for the mental/emotional progression I expect I’ll need during a race.
• I’m 50/50 about whether it would have helped to have reviewed the course within the month prior. I’d done most if not all of that route before so was reasonably familiar, and also studied the route description online so didn’t feel unprepared. I think a certain level of uncertainty actually helped me to “be in the moment” in some ways as well. Then again, knowing exactly how long a descent would be and so on can be helpful for micro-optimization, especially in the final stretches.