TC 10 Mile Prediction

I’ve been giving it too much some thought, and here’s how this Sunday’s TC 10 Mile could possibly play out:

• PR of sub 59:05: 0.00000%. No chance. It won’t happen. There’s nothing in my training that tells me I could do this.

• Sub-60: 0.00001%. There’s the SLIGHTEST chance that I COULD go sub-60. But it’s not going to happen either. Heaven would have to open up, and I’d have to see Jesus hand-in-hand with my 2 dead Grandpas as the 3 of them skip down the street in front of me personally blessing each section of asphalt before I run across it. Can I rule that out? No, not COMPLETELY, so there’s a small outside chance that I could go sub-60. But let’s be clear: this is NOT even something in the back of my mind where I’m saying “There’s only a slight chance on paper, but I’m holding on to hope that I could possibly do this on a good day.” Nope. Not even saying that. Truly.

• Second fastest 10 mile time of sub-1:01:20: 10%. Right now, my “best possible day” is 6:10 pace, which is 1:01:40. So I COULD have a GREAT day and drop a few seconds off that.

• Third fastest 10 mile time of sub-1:02:19: 40%. This is the goal. I’m not sure if I can make this, but I expect to be around this time. It still seems pretty aggressive to me, but it’s still the goal.

• Non-personal worst time of sub-1:03:05: 40%. I feel like there’s an equal shot of being in this window. So I guess that means I’m saying there’s an 80% chance that I’ll be between 1:01:20 and 1:03:05. That’s a pretty small window to be pretty confident of, but that’s REALLY where I think I’ll be. (Four of my previous 10 mile times were in a 25 second window between 1:02:19 and 1:02:44, so my body apparently likes to run that pace.)

• Personal worst time of slower than 1:03:05: 10%. This feels like a decent possibility too - more so than the 10% chance of being sub-1:01:20. My percentages already equal 100.00001%, so I might as well call this a 15% chance and just make everything total 105.00001%. That makes a ton of sense, right?

Obviously there are a lot of “x-factors” that will play into this on Sunday morning. The biggest 5 that I can think of are (1) not having done much hard running in my training, (2) having done less running than usual leading up to this race but more cross training, (3) having not done a race longer than a 5-miler in the last 18 months, (4) not having done a 10 mile by itself (not part of the “Loony Challenge” where I raced a 10K and 5K the day before in 2014 and 2015) since 2011, (5) and not having a huge desire to suffer a ton. Regarding that last point: I’m racing on a team, but I will be the fastest or 2nd fastest on my team, so I have nothing to “prove.” (I can almost guarantee you that me dropping 2 minutes will NOT affect my team results at all.) I have no stake in my self-worth tied to the outcome of this race. I could finish in 1:06 and say “ehh, I guess it just didn’t happen today” and truly be OK with that (after being bummed for about 4 seconds post-race). In earlier years of racing, this was less of the case, so I really had the urge to go ALL OUT and not let myself down. Now, “myself” doesn’t care as much. Myself wants to enjoy myself a bit more.

So all that being said, there are 2 main ways this can go. If my ego takes hold at the start, I could churn out some decently fast miles but then start to suffer pretty quick. If I can hold on and suffer a bit, this would give me the best time, but with a fair amount of pain. Or, if my body takes hold at the start, I’ll start more conservatively being unsure of my training, enjoy the race a bit more while not suffering as much, and negative split the race in a good mood but with a slower overall time. (Obviously, there are extremes here too: I could go out WAY too hard and instead of posting a great time, I’d crash and burn around mile 7.) I feel like I’ll end up somewhere along this sliding scale of “XX% going out hard and XX% being a bit conservative.” We’ll see what my body does when the gun goes off.

Now it's time to pick out my race attire. Pink shorts, or tutti frutti shorts, or shorty yellow shorts? Let me go check the weather....