The Tale of the Charlotte 10K
I completed my second 10K race yesterday.
It was comical how little I worried about it (none) compared to my first 10K (tons) in July of 2019. It’s nice to know that all of the work I’ve been putting in has made swimming for two hours and forty minutes and twenty-nine seconds (not that we’re counting) seem trivial.
I should feel really happy about it – I dropped almost 20 minutes from my previous time. Some of that had to do with the air and water temps being around 60 and 68 instead of 80 and 85 (and thus not getting a foot cramp three quarters of the way through the swim), but that is still a lot of time to drop. I was bumming a bit though about my 1:36/hundred average pace… although it helped that as I was working on this post I realized that that was in meters, not yards. SwimSwam tells me that converts to 1:26.
So that only leaves me to bum about the fact that I yet again got my ass kicked by the same person who has been kicking it for years… but it’s hard to bum about that when she is so unattainably awesome 🙂 Especially since it just sends me back into the pool ready to work harder and smarter and to try take her some day 🙂
The race ended up being just about as tough as it was possible for it to be. We swam in the Catawba River outside of Charlotte, NC, downstream from Duke Energy’s dam. Duke Energy very nicely agreed to turn off the water at 7:45, prior to our 8 AM race start. However, as you might imagine, it takes water a long time to flow over 3 miles. So we started off against a current. However, by the time we had swum those self-same three miles, the water was done flowing. So we swam back without any boost. Instead, we got the delight of a pretty peppy wind in our faces. Erg.
So I should really be pretty satisfied with holding a 1:26ish pace for 6 miles going against the current and the wind. I should.
At the time when I should have stopped it, my watch was saying just over 10,000 yards, move time of 2:40something, average pace of 1:35/100 yards (so as far as my wondering if the FORM goggles are underestimating my pace, that is in fact too slow, if the race calculations had it right)
Looking at my heart rate, during the race it climbed gradually from 120 to 135 for the first 45 minutes; held there to 1 hour 30; and then climbed on an even slope to 170 at the finish.
Interestingly, my stroke rate was very consistent – it was between 68-72 strokes per minute the whole way. There’s some stochastic up and down between those, but the graph at the end looks pretty much like the graph at the beginning and the middle.
