10K after 10 years
I ran a 10K race this Friday (Sept 20, 2024).
The last time I ran a 10K was 10 years ago, in 2015 (pic on the left). Okay, it is not exactly 10 years, but 10K after 9.5 years is not as catchy. 10 years ago, I had a head full of hair, a beard with wasted potential, and a sub 1 hour 10k run time. Today, I have only one of these (pic on the right).
Last time, I completed the 10K run in about 56 minutes. I had prepared for it for months, doing 5K runs twice or thrice a week. Being younger was also helpful, although I didn’t realize it at the time. This time around, I thought it might be an interesting challenge to run without any preparation at all and compare it to my previous performance.
I looked up my last run from a couple of months ago, which was a 2.2 mile run in 21 minutes. Based on this and my last 10k run time, I figured that an hour would be a good high bar for success. For the low bar of success, I chose 2 hours, expecting to complete the race somewhere closer to 1.5 hours.
Even though I didn’t do any physical preparation, I couldn’t stop myself from looking up some reddit threads about cold running a 10K race. The results were … not so encouraging. But I decided to not be a midwit and just run. After all, running is just putting one foot in front of the other. And that is exactly what I decided to do.
I completed the entire race just shy of an hour – 59 minutes and 8 seconds to be precise. My lap times looked like a normal distribution with the 4 mile taking the longest. The fact that Gym De Shokeen started playing right after I crossed the 4 mile marker may or may not have had anything to do with the improved performance after the 4th mile :P.
Honestly, I am really proud of my performance (that’s not saying too much though, I get impressed fairly easily, especially with myself.) I enjoy staying active and working out and I have been doing so for the past ten years in some form or the other – running, strength training, muay thai, hiking, tennis. But I don’t look super fit or anything. This race is something that I can point to as the compounding result of investing in my health all through the years. Let’s see how I hold up in 2035!