Times Colonist 10K Race Report

Funny story. So a couple of weeks ago I was looking at my blog's stats, and I clicked on traffic sources. Turns out that one of the key terms people use to stumble on my blog is "Alex Coates 10k results". ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I mean I am all for looking up people's results if they do a race, but just randomly googling to try to figure out how fast I run a 10k? SO MUCH PRESSURE! I generally like to think that no one cares about how fast I am, and that it doesn't really matter so long as I can preform in triathlons, but apparently everyone else just wants to know how fast I can run a 10k.

Well blog stumblers, today is your lucky day. Yesterday I ran a PB of over a minute, and I am going to share it with you. My new best time is 36:46. Now I just made your google search much easier.

Here is a pic of the start. The only person I can pick out that I know is Grant Burwash.

Anyways, Race Report: the 10k was really fun yesterday. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and for the first time in a road race I raced as an Elite, which was really awesome because I got to put my stuff in the elite tent which was next to the start line! Cool! Apparently there were more than 13, 000 racers.

I drove down to the course at 6:45 am, and was pretty confident that 90% of the people driving downtown with me were headed to the race. Warm up was interesting, and I'm not going to lie, I was kind of panicking when I tried to do some 90 sec pick ups at pace and they felt like all out sprints. I kept looking down at my giant Garmin and thinking, "Are you kidding me?"

Look how pretty the flowers are!

The nice thing about racing in general is you know that you can't ever think about how you feel in warm up, or the day before, or how you slept etc. because you never really know how you are going to feel in the race until you are in it. When the race started all of a sudden my Garmin was telling me I was easily going 3:35's, which was where I wanted to start out, and so my confidence was back and I settled into a good race.

I love Victoria

My goal was obviously to run a 36:40, which is the World Cup standard, and the battle plan was to try to go out conservative, and then to basically even split my km's just under 3:40s.

The race was hilly, so I worked the downhills in order to even out my uphills. I looked at my Garmin a lot, but never really freaked out. I tried to run smooth and controlled. At 5 k I found a guy who turned into my pacer. He was going the perfect pace and I just stuck onto him for dear life. At 6 k the gloves came off (Literally. Someone gets a new pair of sweaty gloves!). At 7k the legs felt a little wobbly, but the nice thing about being a triathlete is you know that that is what your legs feel like at the start of the 10k in a triathlon. With 1500 meters to go I opened it up and really went for it. My pacer guy told me I could catch the girl in front of me, so I left him behind and tried to catch her. As soon as I could see the finish line I looked at my watch, realized I had a minute and ten seconds to make the time, and i just started gunning it! I must have looked absolutely insane. I was sprinting so hard. I was imagining this was the sprint for the Olympic gold medal. I caught the girl with about 150 meters to go. She realized the insane person running past her was a fellow female, and started sprinting as well thinking that I was just trying to beat her. Of course at this point I didn't care at all about what place I was in, and was just trying to pump my legs faster. In the end I crossed the line and knew I had just missed it. Also, the other girl out sprinted me.

Cool race picture of Simon, who place 2nd overall. 

It's sad to know that I missed the time by 6 seconds, because really, if for 6 kilometers out of the 10 I had run 1 second faster, I would have made it. 1 second! Anyways, all in all it was a great day and I am really happy with my new best time. Thanks so much to the race organizers and volunteers who put on a great race.

ps. I stole these pictures from the Times Colonist website.