Race Diary: Frank Duffy 10 Mile Race

Race Diary: Frank Duffy 10 Mile Race

Those of us who participated in the Irishrunner 5 mile last month must have been waiting patiently for the next race in the series of the precursors to the Dublin Marathon.

The race itself was great. Following my perfomance in training I set myself a target of completing the race in under 90 minutes. I managed to complete as planned (88 minutes).

My personal best is 86 minutes for the same distance. I have to say I found it extremely hard to keep going in today's race. The weather today was close to what you would wish for, for a perfect race. It was cloudy and a bit of light drizzle here and there. The only downfall was that it was quite humid today. The sun generally stayed away today as it usually does in Ireland.

According to the official commentators from FM 104, there were more than 6000 athletes registered for this race. I came out 2112 overall and in my (over 35 male) category I came 361st. I am probably disappointed by the outcome because I know I can do better and I have done better during training.

Self Evaluation

I have done a lot of training and I do all of the training by myself. This is the second competitive race I have ever participated in. I realized that race psychology is very important. It's quite intimidating to be surrounded by close to 6000 athletes. You do not know what to expect. I could tell that a good deal of athletes were quite experienced from the way they conduct themselves and their demeanor before the race began.

I think this psychologically put me at a disadvantage even before i started the race. When the race kicked off I was in the middle of the 6000 or so sea of runners. I couldn't help but glance at people's feet to see what they were wearing. By far Asics was the shoe of choice for most runners. Incidentally it's the most expensive brand in the local shops. I talked about the psychological influence that the branded shoes give to a racer in my previous post.

I stuck with my 15 euro a pair shoes although I have been training mostly with the Nike. I chose to stick with the tried and tested. During the first few miles of the race there was not much room to overtake or room to run at a faster pace than the people in front of you. My pace was determined by the racers within my vicinity. I thought the initial pace was a little bit slower than what I am usually used to. I like to start with a good 5+ minutes per km because I know that as the race goes on I loose pace slowly irregardless of whether I start slow or fast.

When training I usually like to do much of my work in the first half of the race. I like to go into a comfort zone in the second half knowing well that I have already done enough in the early stages of the race.

Here lies the problem. Most racers seem to find their feet in the later half of the race and many

of them duly did so today. As a result many racers overtook me in the second half.

This affected me pyscholofically. Because I generally train by myself and I am devoid of competitive sessions I was not psychologically prepared to deal with people overtaking me. I lost a lot of pace.

On the other hand one thing that affected possitively was the presence of spectators along the final mile or so. Because you don't want to be seen to be struggling i really kicked up the dust particularly the last 100 meters or so but I guess it was too late.

Dispite this today was a great day and it was nice to see people of all walks of life and ages participate together in today's competition. I salute all the much older people than me who participated today. A good number of them did much better than me. I will take this as motivator to keep going and running for as long as possible.

So I go into the preparation of the next half marathon knowing what my shortfalls are and hopefully correct some of them.