Race Report: Mothers Day 10K

So this report is coming a bit late.... make that a lot late.  So if you roll back the clock to one fateful Sunday, May the 8th to be exact, it was Mothers day.  Now every year my mom has a tradition of doing this race as a "family".  I mean do in the most literal of senses in that we all do some part of the race, I'll run the 10, my sister will usually join me, my brother used to run but now does bike pacing, and my mom will run/walk the 5k.  This year, it just so happened that all the remained was my mom and I, but no matter the show must go on. 

I've been doing this run for as long as I can remember, it used to be done up by the university and you'd end up in a stadium, but with passing time, more and more people register and this event keeps on getting larger (read: gongshow).  We've had bad weather for the past few years, and this year was no exception.  Nice rainy conditions on the morning of did not put me in a great mood.  In addition we had moved from the course of the past few years to one around chinook.  Not normally a huge deal but when it's wet I'd really like to know the course because then you don't need to worry about looking at where you're going and what not.  And the other thing with it raining is it brings up a whole host of other problems.  Running cold is one thing, running while wet is a completely different thing, but apparently according to people that were managing ATOC, riding for an hour in in crappy wet conditions only brings down your body temperature by 1 degree celsius an hour.  I would've though it'd be more than that but hey they know best.

Now like I said earlier because there's always so many people, these races have a ton of people who for the most part are not seeded in the correct order.  Now this makes for a problem because when you have to waste lots of energy cutting through people it's energy wasted not going forward.  For some reason though I think it might've just been the pace that I set out at and managed to keep that I didn't really have to filter through a lot of people nor did I have a lot of people passing me.  The course wasn't bad, there was one little kick up at 2 miles that I didn't particularly enjoy, but hey.  After that at 3.5 miles on it was just kinda a slow drag up.

I was going to target something closer to a 40 minute 10k this year, but mother nature just wasn't going to co-operate with us which is fine.  I ended up running a 46 minute, so a lot slower than I was hoping but I ran a pretty evenly paced run around 7:20 a mile.  Overall it was a wet run, cramped a little bit in the final stretch which definitely didn't help, but hey I'm happy didn't run it at full effort and it was a good confidence builder for the up and coming Marathon.

~Cheers