10K at Race Pace

Just finished the last moderate distance run before the race itself, covering 10K at my intended race pace. Tomorrow I'll be doing a short 6K run at the same pace, and will finish off my training with a slow 3K run on Saturday morning to freshen up the legs a bit. In the interests of maximizing recovery, I used a different route that was a good deal less hilly than my usual path. The goal, naturally, was to attempt to maintain a stable 4:44min/km pace for the duration to get my legs used to moving at this speed.

The weather turned out to be near perfect, with the temperature at a comfortable 17C and clear skies. As such, I headed out just after 10:00, running out a little more than 5K then turning around and heading back. My pace was a little faster than intended near the beginning, but I managed to pick up the planned place just after the third kilometer. I managed to hold that pace until about 8K, when I unintentionally began to pull ahead again (9K at 4:34min/km and 10K at 4:36min/km). Overall, the average pace for the entire run worked out to about 4:41min/km.

I'll definitely have to pay a bit more attention on the run tomorrow to even things out, but that variance wasn't too bad so it shouldn't be a major issue. Naturally, no matter what I do here pacing will be a little different during the race itself as running in a crowd is a lot different than running solo.

With that said, the 4:44 pace felt quite comfortable and I think that it shouldn't be a problem pulling off the full distance at this speed. My heart rate stabilized at a little under 80% after 2km, and stayed there for the duration of the run. Unfortunately the heart rate strap slipped out of place in the last 2K so I don't have reliable data, but looking at the raw beat-to-beat data it would appear to have maintained the trend all the way to the end.