2020 Cherry Blossom 10 mile Virtual Race

a post-race selfie

Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)

Well, first of all, check out these achievements I earned during the race:

Fastest mile! 6:54

Fastest 5k! 22 min 30 seconds!

Fastest 10k! 46 min 40 seconds - need to do this at a 10k race!

Finally, here’s the time!

10 miles in 1 hour 14 minutes 48 seconds

hard to run slowly to this music

I looked at the RunCoach.com website and, based on the training they’d been having me do, they predicted a 7:52/mile race pace. So I set that in my Garmin and headed out. But I was listening to my techno album Y2K: Beat the Clock and to Lionize. And so I just couldn’t go that slowly. I keep going faster than the pace I was supposed to go. I was worried that would wear me out. But I just kept up that pace, slowing on the long uphill stretches, but overall keeping a good pace. In face, even though miles 5-7 were close to that pace, even they were faster. And I did a sprint in the 0.25 miles, responsible for my best mile ever recorded by the Garmin. And so, as you can see above, I averaged a 7:29/mile pace. Very, very exciting. I cannot wait to run this race next year with others around me (and after having had a full year of training)

Throughout this training, for the past few weeks, RunCoach.com has had me running 12 miles every weekend as my long run. I’d been having doubts about being able to do a half marathon before this training, but now it’s right there within reach and I’m definitely also trying to figure out which half marathons might be available for sign up in the future. I’ll leave you with some amusing stats from the Garmin.

I guess I should take it easy tomorrow

• Race
• Racing
• Running