CTL slide has been reversed! Some solid training this week, moving into week 3 of the GetFast plan ... 8 days in California trainerroad challenge starts May 12, that'll be a nice bike focus, ending on Victoria's Du, which may require some tricky timezone justification to get that last ride in on the trainer.
I was hoping that this would be the magical 10k in which I would break 40 minutes, something which I've been trying fairly half-heartedly to do for a few years now... spoiler alert, it wasn't.
This course was two loops of a 5k circuit with a climb on each side of the loop, the first is long and slow, the second short and steep. Once you're over the steep part, it's downhill for about 1k to the finish. My "plan" was to keep the pace around 3:55 for the first lap. I quote plan because I didn't really know how I was going to feel on the second lap. As the saying goes, wishful thinking is not a plan.
The first lap went well: I was near the front, while breathing hard, not totally gasping yet and feeling like my legs might make it. Halfway through the second lap, things started to hurt. The long gradual climb into a headwind really took me to a zone I didn't want get to yet. I was in 5th for most of lap, and moved into 4th on the downhill after that climb, and was hoping to recover enough to handle the coming climb into the finish.
I could hear the runner I had passed coming up behind me on the flat, so I eased up slightly to let him catch me, hoping that I could get out of the red zone enough that I could still handle following him up the hill: on the previous lap, he had out-run me up the hill, but then I had caught him on the long downhill leading into the second lap. I hoped to repeat that. He caught up to me just at the base of the hill, and I managed to stay with him up the first half of the hill, then cracked. I fell rapidly off the pace and limped up to the top, then decided to salvage what I could of the race.
My pace slowly picked up through the last km, but the first I saw of the timer at the finish line was 35:56 ... 57 ... etc. I came in 18 seconds later, all grace and poise, as illustrated below.
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