COFFEE & BISCUITS

I did a 10k race today (about 6.2 miles), and I reached my goal — which is to average less than 10min/mile (My pace average 9:49 min/mile. YAY!). For you (Kat) who said that a happy person is one who reached her goal, that makes me a happy person, today.

Here is my race record:

bib number,FIRST NAME,LAST NAME,place,Div,SEX,city,split,time,pace
1675,ANNA,WONG,807,F2529,F,CHICAGO, 29:24,1:00:51,9:49

And now, invest in a good pair of running shoes, and then on to the next one:

MORE SPEED!

Kelly: In case you want to know, Boston qualifying time for a woman my age is about an average pace of 8min40sec / mile for the 26.2 miles.

More afterthought about this race
If you know me, you may wonder why I suddenly got into running, not having been an athlete in my 26 years. Non-runners don’t run for the same reason, but runners run for a variety of reason. My reason is easy to explain — just look at Forrest Gump. He started running after Jenny died, and he just kept on running. When I was young I thought Forrest ran because he is weird, but clearly most good works of fiction came from the author’s experience of life. He and I won’t be the last one to say that, running long distance for us is a therapeutic process. At some point, you just get up and go.

And now, I can connect everything in life to running.

Lesson: DO NOT LET YOUR GUARD DOWN. So this second race is very different from my first face. While it is shorter (6.2mi) compares to 10mi in the last one, I also didn’t prepare as hard for this one. There are times in life when you are proud of yourself for having overcome certain challenges, but then after that, you also became more complacent and might begin to easily slight the smaller challenges. And then you walk into those smaller challenges — underprepared. This is what one means when they say: life caught you off guard. The after feeling of under-performance left a bitter taste in the mouth.

Here, how does running relate? This 6.2 mile actually feels as hard as the 10 mile. The right side-stitch kicked in at about mile 4 (whereas it kicked in at mile 6 for the 10-mile race). Perhaps because I didn’t get any sleep the night before, perhaps I didn’t train as hard, perhaps I underestimated this race, perhaps I got complacent. I could have done this more beautifully had I maintained my training as before the 10-mile.

Regardless, the same lesson holds that, do not estimate any challenge. Maintain steady performance, and do things for the right reason.