Eastleigh 10k 2007

Here's my initial report. I may revise it a bit when I've seen the results of the others - as a team we were a little under strength, but I think the girls at least did OK.

For me, I suspected I was on PB form, so it was all about going out at a good pace and having the confidence that I could sustain that pace. I usually string these reports out a bit, suspense in the story telling and all that, but let's cut to the chase:

km splits:
4:07 137bpm
4:06 148bpm
4:07 151bpm
4:24 154bpm (slight uphill)
4:02 151bpm (slight downhill)
4:08 154bpm
4:10 156bpm
4:05 157bpm
4:07 157bpm
4:09 157bpm
41:29 152bpm

3rd W45 with £30 B&Q vouchers
PB by 40sec, best ever age graded at 78.9%

HR was slightly down on my highest ever 10k HR (155bpm at Totton last year), so probably a bit of fatigue, unsurprisingly. My pace judgement though was pretty good. I'd wondered about trying to keep up with Guy, who I reckoned was heading for just over 40 minutes (which was in fact the case), but I'm glad I didn't try to go with him as I was pretty spent at the end.

It was a very high quality field with 1500 entries. Frank Tickner won the men with a sub-30, and Natalie Harvey won the women with what the race organiser thinks is the UK's fastest time this year (32 something?).

Slight controversy with the club records, as I thought I'd taken the club age record. Having discussed this with Marilyn whose record I thought I'd taken, it seems there was an error and her overall record of 40:34 is actually the W45 record not W50. I'm the club statistician, but if we are apportioning blame then I think the error lies with my predecessor - oops! I guess I need to get faster.

Whatever the stats, I'm very pleased with that result as it's the first time the Macmillan calculator has predicted a marathon time of under 3:15 (just!).