Home > Kevin > Running > 2010 Great Aloha Run

2010 Great Aloha Run

Here's how I trained for the 2010 Great Aloha Run. I came in 20th overall, 2nd in my age division. I was 13 seconds faster than last year.

Story on this race: I was shooting for a 5:45 per mile pace, which would put me right at 47:00 to finish. My first mile, I was a bit behind the initial starting mob, and had to spend some time weaving and dodging in and out of slower runners who really had no business at all being in the front of all 21,000 runners. (NOTE: If you're not a really fast runner, never go to the front of the starting line. All you'll do is gt people mad at you, and you might get hurt. There was a guy with walking poles right near the starting line, for crying out loud!)

Anyway, I passed the Mile 1 mark at exactly 6:00. "Ugh!" I thought to myself. I already had 15 seconds to make up, after only 1 mile! So, I decided to kick it up a notch. Feeling pretty good, I looked at my watch at Mile 2, which said 11:20. Doing some quick math, I realized I had just run a 5:20 mile. That is very fast for me. In fact, thinking about it, that might be the fastest mile I've run in a race. In any case, I now had 10 seconds to spare. Mile 3 came in at about 17:00 even, so I felt good.

However, I had decided to wear my racing flats (very lightweight shoes for races) this race. I hadn't really worn them in a while, nor had I worn them for anything longer than a 5k. So about Mile 3 I felt a blister forming on the ball of my left foot. I tried to alter my gait just a bit to not make it worse, but there wasn't much I could do. About Mile 4 it was getting pretty uncomfortable, but I was at 22:50 for the split. The Aloha Run has a couple of nice hills, though, in the last half, so I was hoping to have some extra gas in the tank for that. At Mile 5, I could tell the blister had popped, which in some ways relieved a bit of the pressure but not much of the pain. I can't remember what my mile splits were after that, but I could tell I was losing some steam. By Mile 7, it was pretty ouchy, but I gutted through it. Any thoughts of keeping on pace went out the window at this point. I still had a bit of a kick left toward the end, so I finished strong. I saw some BYUH Cross Country runners ahead a bit, so tried to finish strong s close to them as I could. I was pleased with my time of 47:18. I was also pleased that no one passed me the whole race--mostly because I had started a bit far from the front of the pack.

When I was going through the finish chute stuff, up by where they hand out bananas and water, I asked if I could get some tape or something for a blister, and the medical guy had me take my shoe off. We both laughed when we saw that my sock and shoe were all bloody.

My shoe after the race

Nice blister!

The most interesting part was how sore my calves were the next few days. I hadn't realized how much I was favoring my blistered foot by keeping on the heels of my feet!

Note: The decimal places are seconds, not hundredths of minutes. So, for example, if you see 20.50, that means 20 minutes and 50 seconds, and not 20 minutes and 30 seconds.