Notes
I was pretty bummed by missing out on Cherry Blossom, but I still haven't gotten much calories onboard since I was sick and so my original plan was to go do a tempo run on Wednesday and just sit on 10 mile effort for however long it was comfortable. But then I discovered last night that I actually don't have Saturday morning for a second workout so I shifted everything and thankfully Tiffany was willing to take Joseph to school this morning. So I went to do the tempo run not expecting a whole lot but having in the back of my head wouldn't it be neat if I made it the whole 10 miles. I wore my old Next% because I don't want to beat up the new ones on a non-race but I still wanted to go fast.
I hit the mile in 5:55 and thought gee this is fast I don't know how long I'll last. I was thinking I'd like to at least get to 10k and maybe be in the low 37 range. I was way ahead of that by 3 laps and just wanted to hang on. By then I was into a rhythm and hitting the same splits on every lap. Everything in the mid/low 5:50s. Not a single quarter mile split over 90 seconds.
There is no 10k marker but I got to 6.19 miles in 36:33. That extrapolates to 36:41 for 10k, which is 5 seconds faster than my time trial best from spring 2020 and 16 seconds faster than my official PR. Felt fine. Kept going. It started to get hard around 7 miles. I kinda stopped looking at intermediate splits at that point and just focused on laps. I guess I decided I was going to 10 miles after I saw the 10k split. But in retrospect I probably was always going to.
The last lap was really hard. My form held and I didn't slow down but it definitely wasn't as comfortable as it was before that. I put everything I had into the last quarter mile and got...an 85. Downhill. So I think I was about tapped out.
On paper this is an equivalent performance to my 1500 and 5000 track times...except it wasn't on a track. So unequivocally the best performance I've ever run. Strange to do it all by myself around a lake early in the morning. It would have been nice to do this with the pageantry of Cherry Blossom but in the end maybe this worked out better for me. I will do this again in a real race next year. So, confidence recovered, on to Providence!