Sporting Life 10K Goal-Time...

Unless something goes horribly wrong, I should be crossing the finish line at the Sporting Life 10K in a little under nineteen hours. The gun will go off at 8:00am. I'll cross the start line around 8:02am. And I'm hoping to be done by 8:52am.

When I signed up, I listed my expected finish time as 0:51:30. I was kind of sandbagging there since my goal time is actually a sub-fifty-minute run, with a stretch goal of running under forty-nine minutes. I ran the Sporting Life last year in 0:51:58, when my best 5K time was 0:26:29. I ran a 0:24:53 5K about a month-and-a-half ago, so I'm hoping that more than a minute-and-a-half improvement on my 5K time translates into a good three-minute improvement in my 10K time.

(If those times seem weird -- i.e., running 10Ks at a faster pace than the 5Ks -- the Sporting Life 10K is a downhill course and good for shaving a good two-to-three minutes off a regular 10K time. My 5K personal bests were set on flat courses.)

I'm not particularly anxious about this run. No massive amounts of pre-race jitters. My only concern is that I've woken up the past two mornings feeling pretty run-down, even after nights where I'd gotten in eight and nine hours of sleeps. And I've been displaying slight head-cold symptoms. Annoying. But there's nothng to do about it but rest up, suck back on the Cold-FX, and letting tomorrow take care of tomorrow.