Buzias 10K Trail Race
Running on trails is a total different story and that’s why I always feel very challenged to participate in such races. One week before this race I participated in the Petrovaselo 5K Trail race where I ran better than I expected.
The obvious next challenge would be an even longer trail race and the opportunity to run it came in very handy. Buzias is a town around 30km from where I live. It’s in an area that starts to get hilly and also here there are a lot of wineyards. The area is very beautiful and at some points it might even have something that makes me think back to Tuscany.
Race Preparation
Unfortunately, I was not able to prepare this race in a more consistent way. The running virus simply got me and I simply signed up for it without really realising it’s just one week apart from the previous one. However, I had at least a baseline from my previous 5k trail race that also had some elevation. I knew that I ran there on a 6:51 min/km average pace.
Definitely, it seemed impossible for me keep the same pace for 10 km straight. Things were not looking good as I also had to travel for work with a very tight and busy schedule that included early work sessions and late dinners. Therefore, I simply didn’t have the time to run for 3 days straight.
My idea was very simple: run a regular 10k the day before the business trip and push as much as I can! If you are a runner you probably know that there are some days when everything seems just right. That’s exactly what I felt during my 10k race simulation that I managed to complete on an average pace of 6:15 min/km. I finished the 10 km 8 minutes faster than my previous 10k attempt. This gave me a huge confidence boost.
Fueling and hydration
Regarding fueling and hydration I decided to stick to my regular 5 k routine. My tought process is quite simple: 10k is still a fairly fast race that I’d probably be able to complete in around one hour and 15 minutes (taking the elevation into consideration). A 75 minutes effort shouldn’t require hydration during the race.
Calories and carbs is also something to take into consideration. My estimation was that I would burn around 700 calories, which is not that much. Since the effort is less than 90 minutes, I wouldn’t require any gel. And also carb loading the days before is not something that might really make sense.
Instead I prepared myself to half a liter water bottles with added electrolytes. I ate a banana after waking up and drank around half of one of the bottles untill I arrived at the race. And that’s pretty much it!
The 10k Trail Race
I’ll be honest and out of the other two completed races, this was the one I was really happy with how it went. There were around 60 participants, therefore it wasn’t that croudy. However, when the race started everybody started out really fast.
This time, however, I was smart enough to not get carried away and kept my planned flat pace of around 6:15 min/km. I realised I was second to last after the first 200 m, but that didn’t bother me. Right afterwards there was a short and steep hill I climbed running and I passed two or three fellow runners. But all others were still in front of me.
Around 1km into the race we had the first longer hill with a gradient of around 5%. I felt good and I kept running on a pace of around 6:50. My heart rate was nearing 170 but that was okay. I felt very confident. On this hill a lot of the participants started to walk and I slowly passed them. Most of them I didn’t meet again until the finish line.
Around 4 km into the race there were already small groups of runners scattered on the trail, each running their own paces. However, that kilometer had a big surprise for us all. Within this kilometer there was a huge hill we needed to climb. Almost 2 kilometers everything was only going up. After the first 800m of this hill my heart rate was constantly at around 185 and I decided to walk the rest of the hill, recover some heart rate and try to push more on the downhill and the subsequent flat portion.
All other participants that were in my sight did exactly the same. But what goes up, comes down and there it was: another 2 km of downhill. The best part is that at some point the trail turned into a road and I found myself running on tarmac. That’s when I decided to push as much as I can and I literally broke all my PRs for short distances: 400m, 1 km, 1 mile, 1/2 mile.
At a certain point, the downhill turned into a flat, but I still managed to keep a pace of just below 6:00. My feet however started to feel tired.
Missing the trail
Trail races are very particular, because you literally run through fields, forests and other type of trails. Sometimes there are a lot of them. Organizers always do a wonderful job of signaling the correct path. But sometimes when you are tired and constantly watch your heart rate, it’s easy to miss the proper trail. And it obviously happened to me as well.
I was running through a wineyard and approaching the limits of the city, where I knew we’d come to a road eventually and that road would lead me to the finish line. At some point, the trail was going slightly right, up a short hill. I totally missed that there was another grass covered trail going slighty left. I took the right onw, which turned out to be the wrong one. I noticed that when I noticed that there are no other race signals on my trail.
The good thing is that we were in an open field and I managed to see where all the other participants run. Eventually, both my trail and the other one would hit the same road, but around 200m apart. I decided to continue to the road and then turn left towards the other participants. So, there I was, back on track. The bad thing is that I actually ran around 300m more than the other participants.
Glorious finish!
Within the last 1.5km I had to slow down a bit, since my heart rate went again well above 180. But in the end I saw the finish line and had enough energy left to sprint the last 200 m and cross it raising the hands. For me, this was a victory: my first official and completed trail race.
I am, however, extremely pleased with my result. Despite the fact that it was a trail race, it had elevation and I got lost, I managed to finish the race with an average pace of around 6:30 min/km. Which was 20 seconds/km faster than the pace I had over the previous trail race, which was only 5k. I felt this as a big achievement and I am very proud of it!
Future plans
Regarding the future, I decided to take everything a little bit more easily. I want to concentrate and master the 10k distance. This means that I won’t participate in any other race untill late September where I plan to run the 10k of the UVT Liberty Marathon, which happens in my home town. My goal for that one is to run the 10k in under 50 minutes. To do that, I started an 8 weeks training plan and I will only focus on this training for the coming 3 months.
That’s pretty much it! How did your first 10k race go?
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