Since the Phoenix Marathon in Jan 2008, I have not run a race and so when the opportunity came up for the 10K race organized by the IITB Alumni association, I did not want to miss it. Even though my running has been sort of erratic for the last few months, it was just a 10K run and I was confident that I would be able to manage it easily.
I left home pretty early as I had to collect my running bib and reached the venue (EGL) at around 6:30AM. I was surprised that there was a reasonable crowd, about 60 people finally participated. It was organized and conducted by people like you and me, so it felt good. I did not know many people there, but luckily that changed as two of my colleagues, Amareshwari and Vinod turned up. They are not regular runners, I do not think they have run in the recent past at all, so it was really nice to see them muster up enthusiasm and show up where others would have just preferred to cuddle up and sleep on a Sunday morning.
The race started pretty much on time at around 7:10AM and the course was a small road along the Golf course where you go up 2.5KM and come back to the starting point for a 5K run. The 10K runners ran 2 loops of the same. I was told that this decision was made so that there would not be a big scatter among the runners and sounded like a fair decision.
I was hoping to finish the race in about 45-50 minutes, but given that I had not run in the recent past, I ended up finishing it in 56 minutes. I think the first person crossed the line in about 47 minutes, so not that bad. In any case, it felt really nice running a race and I hope I can identify and participate in more such runs in the immediate future.
Here is the split up of my 10k timings. I was progressively slow, except for Lap 5 and Lap 10. In Lap 5, I was running back to the starting point for the start of the second loop. I suppose there are two reasons for the faster final lap, the first was that I sprinted the last few hundred meters and the second has nothing to do with me -- my GPS watch showed the last lap as only 780m, so was naturally faster :)
Lap1 5:29
Lap2 5:34
Lap3 5:34
Lap4 5:47
Lap5 5:38
Lap6 5:51
Lap7 5:51
Lap8 5:55
Lap9 6:01
Lap10 4:11
