10K Not So Fun Run

We did a 10K "fun run" this morning for Winter Warriors. The intention was for it to be fun, but to push ourselves like a race. Instead, it felt kind of stupid to me ;)

Our normal start time is 7:50, we were told to start at 8:00. We get there around 7:50, all meet at 8:00 (a bit after actually) and then walk to the "race start". It was freezing cold and we had to walk quite a bit, so it was already rather irritating. We finally got to the start, but didnt begin until 8:25.

My iPhone wouldnt sync up for a bit, but did about 30 seconds into the run. I pushed myself as much as I could and felt pretty good for the first 3 miles. Then I got a bit tired. I needed to slow down a bit for the last few miles. I made myself run through the whole thing despite the fact that I kept wanting to quit and when I stopped Runkeeper told me I had run over 6.5 miles and paced at less than 9 minutes per mile. This seemed a bit off to me. I know my time is right (except for being short a bit in the beginning) but the distance sounded off. I assumed since they had mapped out a 10K it shouldnt have been much off the mileage (6.2).

When I got home I checked my map and it appears while I caught a signal in the beginning I must have lost it. So the time was going but it didnt catch a signal until over a mile into the run - at which point it just drew a straight line between the two points ... and I hadn't been running in a straight line. So I tinkered a bit with the map to try to get a better idea of the distance and ended up with a pace of about 9:07. If you assume my phone/runkeeper was still off and the actual distance was 6.2 my pace would have been more like 9:20. I'm gonna assume the slower pace is more accurate and go with that! Either way, I ran it pretty fast and definitely feel like I treated it more like a "race" than a normal run.

Running Log
Time:57:51   Distance:6.2mi   Pace:9:20

Despite the confusion with the RunKeeper, I'm sure the last three miles had the right splits:

4 9:26
5 9:33
6 9:22

And since I know I slowed down those last three (cuz I was pooped) and also just by doing the math, I know the first three were faster. I ran the first three miles, plus the .2 in the end, in 29:30 (just taking my total time minus miles 4, 5 & 6). Thats an average pace of 9:13.

A lot of math and rambling here, because I am basically trying to figure it out myself! Im actually pretty ticked my phone/gps didnt sync because that was really fast for me. I looked through all of my race times and, if this had been a real race, it would have been my fastest pace ... regardless of distance (even 5Ks!). I have only run one other 10K and did that in 1:03:01 - so todays time beat that by over 5 minutes.