A w00t a year in the making...

[Lucía]

(Impatient people and those in a hurry skip down to the picture which is pretty self-explanatory).

When I ran my first 10K in April 2010 I wasn't even sure if I would finish it alive. When I survived it and finished with a time of 1:10, I told myself my next goal was to break the hour. I then proceeded to not train for months on end, picking up the running again in time for the annual St. Silvestre 10K on New Year's Eve. I ran 1:13. I kept training, half-heartedly (well, to be honest, half-assedly) and managed to get my PR down to 1:07, but the sub-hour seemed further away than ever. Hadn't I been running for a year with no success?

But when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. One of my boyfriend's old school friends mentioned that we should sign up for a half-marathon in his hometown, Vitoria-Gasteiz, in December. I decided that I had survived enough 10Ks to try for a half, but clearly my self-devised training plan of "go for a light jog whenever you are in the mood and have time and don't have to get up early the next day and the stars are aligned" wasn't going to cut it.

Just back from holidays in India at the beginning of July, I found a beginner's half-marathon training program that wasn't too scary, printed it out, put it on my fridge, put on my hard hat and went to work. What was two, maybe three (sometimes one!) shuffles a week became four or five must-do workouts. And finally, improvements began to be seen.

I didn't want to sign up for any races before my half, to cut down on injury risk, but it is my suburb's annual festival this week and yesterday there was a 10K run as part of the festivities. I couldn't very well say no to that, so I signed up. A few days before the race, I managed, for the first time, to run 5K in less than half an hour (some of you have seen the related w00t). Of course, that doesn't translate necessarily into being able to run 10K in less than an hour, but it felt very close, and lining up at the beginning of the race I was nervous. Could I do it?

I started at just under a 6 minute per kilometre pace, but when I got to Km 5 I started to wonder if I could keep it up another five. I just kept thinking "Keep turning the cranks. Keep turning the cranks" and focusing on my feet hitting the ground in an even rhythm, without paying attention to aches, pains, and fatigue. I didn't have the energy to ramp up the pace in the last K like I had planned, but I managed to hold it until the finish line. And the proof is in the pudding:

58:19! Almost two minutes better than my goal, and almost nine minutes better than my last PR. I'm elated, and now I am wondering whether I should shoot for a sub-two-hour half. I didn't think it was possible before, but who knows? I still have about two and a half months to find out what I'm really made of.

[Denny]

It feels great to break that hour mark doesn't it? Great work!

[Kain]

Great job, I read it all. You tore down your own PR!

Now...how do you get into the NomClub? lol