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Joe Kleinerman 10k

Date: Sunday, January 4, 2020
Time: 49:04 (7:54 pace)
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/2981130056

Today I ran the Joe Kleinerman 10k, a hilly race in Central Park and NYRR’s first race of the year. The race is named for Joe Kleinerman, an NYRR founder who also helped lead a national movement to allow women to race distances longer than one mile.

My goals for the race were:

In December, NYRR updated best pace calculations to use only races from the past year, which meant many runners moved back corrals. My best pace was from 2018, so my corral assignment dropped from D to E. One of my goals for 2020 was (is) to move up to corral C; being moved back was not part of the plan! While I knew I wasn’t going to move up to C at my current fitness level, I figured I could get back into D on a reasonably good day.

Before the race

I checked the weather forecast every day leading up to the race, hoping it wouldn’t be below freezing and snowing (gotta love winters in NYC). I was in luck; race morning would be high-40s with light rain. I could have done without the drizzle, but thankfully it was light and not accompanied by heavy winds.

I had planned to wear compression tights and a long-sleeved merino wool shirt, and even laid these out the night before, but in the morning, it looked warm enough that I decided last-minute to wear shorts and a team singlet. Since I had a time goal that I wasn’t feeling too confident about, I went with Vaporfly Next%. Even though I’m not totally convinced they actually make me that much faster, wearing them is a nice psychological boost.

Even though the race started at 8 am, I woke up a bit after 5 am, planning to allow plenty of travel time (MTA on weekends…), as well as time for bag check so I could bring a jacket. This was my first-ever time using bag check at a NYRR race, and I didn’t know whether to add 10 minutes or 30 minutes, so better safe than late. One of my goals this year is to be better about eating a proper breakfast (not just coffee), and I had overnight oats from a mason jar (classic Brooklyn millennial?).

The race

After getting to Central Park, I used a porta-potty and checked my bag with plenty of time to spare. I usually like to do a 1-mile warmup, but it was already surprisingly crowded, so I settled for 0.8 miles before finding my corral and trying to move towards the front.

The first half mile was very crowded, which I think was compounded by it being downhill and many people going out too fast. Since I wanted to run the first couple of miles conservatively, I tried to only expend energy passing people when I felt truly blocked and didn’t have to swerve too widely. No use burning out before we even got up Harlem Hill.

The pacing strategy was surprisingly hard to figure out, given the number of rolling hills along the course. I planned to ease up on uphills and to take downhill segments harder, but didn’t know what the lap splits should look like. I passed 5k in 24:39, and since I have almost never achieved negative splits, I figured sub-48 wasn’t likely to happen, but sub-50 still seemed safe. My legs never felt terrible, but I just couldn’t get more speed out of them, even on downhill stretches (running hard at Harry’s Handicap on Wednesday probably wasn’t a great idea).

My mile splits were:

Note: I ended up doing manual lapping on my watch. Even though GPS accuracy is usually excellent in Central Park, even being off by a few seconds per mile can mess with you mentally during a race.

Overall, 7:54 average pace. The cutoff for corral D is 7:54 pace; I literally made it with seconds to spare (I was even worried my pace might somehow round up to 7:55). I started kicking towards the finish right after the 6-mile mark rather than with closer to 100m to go, and regretted it about 30 seconds later (especially since I made the exact same mistake at Team Champs, which has the same finish line location), until I later realized this is what (barely) got me under the cutoff.

I wish I could have found 5 seconds and gotten that sub-49, but overall I’m happy. I got back into corral D, and trying to move up to C will be a good goal and training motivation. I also PR’ed my 10k by almost 4 minutes and got an official sub-50 in the books!