A few months after the freezing Great Winter Run 2016, I did my first 10k race. The Run Sunderland event in May is a nice flat course, and these days I get a PB there every year (when it’s not cancelled for pandemic reasons). However, the first time I did it, it felt pretty tough!
It was a fairly miserable wet day (during my early days of running, the trend seemed to be that all my training runs took place in glorious sunshine and all my races in bad weather!), and I found the distance really tough going. I had run 10k in training (about a week before the race), and that had gone okay, but the day of the race was tougher (perhaps due to the weather) and at 6-7k in I was really struggling and plodding along.
Still, I made it round in about an hour and a half, and so because the half marathon runners set off about half an hour after the 10k runners, I got to the finish before the half marathon winner – which I took as a victory that day!
These days 10k feels like a relatively easy distance (I meandered round it in a much faster time at ‘exploring’ pace last weekend), but back in 2016 it was hard. Just needed a bit more practice 🙂