Portland 10K Marathon* Race Report

Sneaking Into The "Fast People" Corral

My goal going into this race was to get a PR. Feeling a bit ambitious, I snuck up to the front of the corral, right next to all the people gunning to qualify for Boston. These folks weren't messing around. I felt like I just snuck through the little curtain on the airplane and sat in the first class seat I saw while the flight attendant wasn't looking.

And it worked! No one asked what my pace was, they just thought I was one of them. My stretch goal was sub 40 minutes for the entire 10K.

We counted down to the official start time and everyone was off. We all started off at sub 7 minute mile pace. For those few miles I felt like a peer. It was incredibly flattering to be mixing it up with the Boston qualifying crowd.

I felt GREAT. But of course not "Boston Qualifying shape" great for 26 miles. I knew running at this pace meant I was running on borrowed time. And that's the trick: finishing the course before your legs can no longer cash the checks that your pace has been writing. I was confident I could keep that pace for 10K, but no longer than that.

How I Got Here

My official PR is 47 minutes, and that was built almost entirely on easy miles. If I needed to break that PR, I knew I had to do something different than just more easy miles. The hope was that if I traded away some easy road miles for some hard track miles, I'd start busting out of my plateaus and getting PRs again.

Every Saturday morning I've been doing K repeats on the track. Two and a half laps, about 4 minutes, with 2 minutes of rest. I got as comfortable as I could gunning for 24 seconds every 100 meters. By the last lap, "comfortable" meant about as comfortable as a knife fight in a phone booth.

After an 8 week mini block last winter, I finally broke 20 minutes in the 5K. Building on that plus 8-10 more K repeat sessions every Saturday, I was able to hold 3:55 to 4:00 Ks for each K repeat.

If I accounted for my super fancy carbon plated Nike Vaporfly 3s and race day adrenaline, I couldn't help but assume I would be good for another few seconds of speed per km. If I could keep my effort steady on the uphills and recover on the downhills, I could count on a nasty closing kick to make up for any lost seconds at the end.

Add it all up and you get sub 40. In concept.

In retrospect, I noticed this math conveniently includes two minutes of standing around to rest between every kilometer. The Portland 10K, unfortunately, does not offer this feature.

How The Race Went

My race plan had 3 distinct parts. The first part was to be a little conservative through the first and biggest hill. After that, the course has some mild rolling hills, where I planned on settling into my race pace. Once the course flattened out, broke off from the marathon course and turned back onto Naito Parkway, I would SEND IT to the finish.

Part one went great. I was excited, my stride was open, my form was clean and I was in lock step with all the fast marathoners. The plan was perfect. No one suspects a thing. Muahaha. I held 4:10 to 4:20 per kilometer through the first few Ks, which felt sustainable, since it was significantly slower than what I practiced on the track. In my mind I had to do a little bit of math: every km split I ran over 4:00 minutes meant that I needed to be that much under 4 minutes during the back half.

Then came West Burnside. The hill itself wasn't particularly steep, but the fact that it went on for the better part of an entire mile made it feel like a grind. On the worst part of the climb I slowed to almost 6:00 per kilometer. By the time I crested it around kilometer 4, I knew that running the back half under 4:00 pace wasn't realistic. Instead of sub 40, I knew I had to adjust to perhaps sub 42 minutes. Not the end of the world -- I didn't have time to get grumpy, just gotta keep the legs turning.

The downhills were fun, but I couldn't take advantage of the free speed to make up time. I backed off just a little bit and maintained about 4:15-ish min/km effort to do what I could to recover from the climb up Burnside. I never got to the point where I could get back down to under 4 minutes/km.

Kilometer 8 was where I was supposed to make my move. This was where the 10Kers broke off from the marathoners and we would turn back to get to the finish line. I went looking for the gear and the gear wasn't there. I worked hard just to keep a 4:20 pace. My heart rate was already approaching 180, which is significantly higher than my lactate threshold. If I had surged then, I would have risked blowing up and cramping on the home stretch.

I had to adjust my goal again to "just finish strong" and hope that I had energy left for a kick.

Once I turned onto Naito I knew I was on the home stretch. I grabbed a cup at the water station, drank a little, and dumped the rest on my head. I still needed to be patient. My watch said it was about 1 km to go. I had maybe 400 or 500 meters of kick in my body and I needed to preserve that.

In my mind I gave myself one of those rousing battle speeches like in the movies. I was the general on the horse, riding up and down the line before the battle. "Come on, legs, do you expect to live forever?" After the better part of 40 minutes of hard running, my brain went to old timey war movies.

The finish line is not where we run easy. We have easy runs at home!

Once I had the finish line square in my sights, I let loose. Let's see how much kick I have left in these legs. I surged, topping out at around 3:30 per kilometer as I crossed the finish. I crouched over to catch my breath. Instead of focusing on the pain, I thought to myself, "This is a PR attempt. I'm SUPPOSED to feel like this." This is the way.

The Official Numbers (c'mon, I know y'all needed to see them)

 

 

Officially it's a 3 minute PR. It wasn't the PR I was gunning for, but still a PR. I'll take it.

The Part I Feel Guilty About

I was surprisingly unsatisfied.

Yes, I know how that sounds. I finished top 3 percent, a PR, a closing kick I'm proud of, and still I'm not satisfied. I had been gunning for sub 40 and I missed by four minutes. My pre-race expectations undermined my joy.

Here's the thing I've been processing in the days since. A 40 minute 10K isn't two 20 minute 5K efforts stapled to the back of one another. I felt I had a puncher's chance, but ultimately my fitness didn't provide a big enough buffer to account for the course, the hills, etc. I accept that.

I ran the race with some friends who were doing their first 10K. Watching them get their first medals gave me more joy than the 30th (probably more, I lost count) one that I just received. The diminishing returns on that dopamine hit hard, bro.

I kept my melancholy to myself. It was their day, and I wasn't going to hog the spotlight to brag and/or complain about my finish. I was happy enough just watching them have a good time. I wasn't even going to correct them when they said it was their first "Marathon*."

Lessons I Learned

• Speedwork stays. One hard session a week took me from a plateau to PRs at the 5K, the 10K, the half marathon and the marathon in under a year. They're painful in the moment but a little goes a long way. I like how holding marathon pace feels way easier now that I've spent time on the track.
• I know what 10K effort feels like now. I can look at VDOT O2 charts and study HR zones for days, but it doesn't beat knowing how it feels in my legs and my chest. I know if I'm doing it right by gauging how I feel against how the PDX 10K went.
• I got glimpses of Boston. The pace I ran for 10K is around 4:20-4:30 min/km -- the pace I need to maintain for the entire marathon. If I can extend this pace for a little over 3 hours, then that's good enough for Boston. I know I have a ways to go, but now I know what that speed feels like.
• More 10Ks. They let me practice that speed without the wear and tear of a long distance like a marathon. I'll be sure to mix in half marathons too.  

 

Where I Go Now

 

I feel like Ryu at the end of Street Fighter II. Everyone else is at the ceremony and he's already walking off into the sunset, looking for the next challenge. The ceremony means nothing. The fight is everything.

I'm going to do the same -- take maybe a week off to run easy, to reflect on my lessons learned, and to look ahead to the next challenge.

For me that means heading back to the track and bringing that 5K time down.

That's all I got for you today.

Now go run.

• Footnote: before you @ me, yes, I know a marathon is 26 miles 385 yards, or 42km and 195m. It's a completely arbitrary number. But the entire event itself was billed as the Portland Marathon, with the start line and the finish line both with the word MARATHON on them. With the exception of a little piece of text that reads "10K," the bib says "Portland Marathon" on it. If new runners get more experience running races, they'll learn on their own. I'm not going to be a pedant and correct them within a few minutes of finishing possibly the longest distance they had ever run before.