However Sharon Peleg, my assistant at work, found a 10k race near his home in a suburb of Tel Aviv. He has only recently started running, he says that I inspired him, and his longest run so far has been 4 kilometers. I encouraged him to sign up for the race and we'd both do it. He hessitated and said that he'd try to do 5 kilometers next time he runs and then decide. The next morning we signed up for the race.
It was an out and back course that started and ended in a small neighborhood athletic park. The course was a bit hilly but I tried holding him at a steady 7 min/km pace through the first half, which turned out to be mostly downhill. Our 5k time was a little faster than our target at about 33 minutes. Going back up the hill was a bit tough, but since we took it easy at the beginning we made it to the top without taking any walking breaks. Once we saw the 8k marker at the top of the hill we knew we could finish it, in fact we had a pretty good sprint once we got on the track for the final 200 meters and hit a top speed of 4:28 min/km (7:11 min/mi).
I'll update this with the official finishing time but to this photo, we clocked in at 1:08:33. That would be my best 10k running time yet and the first time Sharon ran that distance. Of course we didn't win, but our goal was to do it at 1:10 and not be the last ones to finish!
The only glitch was that the Polar software recorded the distance as only 9.287 kilometers, way short of 10k so the average pace results are off. I'm now seriously thinking about getting a GPS unit. It would also help once I get home and start getting into bicycling.
In any case I increased my mileage (kilometerage?) from a total of 10 kilometers last week to 13 kilometers this week. Nothing to brag about, but I am trying increase the distance a little bit each week. Oh, and my ankle feels pretty good so hopefully I'm over that injury.
0 comments:
Post a Comment