York White Rose Five Mile run

As my running season comes to close tomorrow, I find myself in a reflective and contemplative mode.  I have had a good year and am looking forward to the prospect of an even better year in 2011. The White Rose race is one of the few races I have run both last year and this year.  The organizers handed out an excellent red technical T-shirt last year.

I feel very blessed with my wife doing great at studying for her degree, my boys are happy, and we are getting by financially with help from our immediate families. In a lot of ways, I have never been happier in my life.

Back to running.  I am going to use the virtual partner function on my Garmin GPS watch and set a very aggressive thirty eight minute time goal for tomorrow's run. This translates to 7:36 minute per mile pace. I ran the Beach to Beacon 10K (6.2 miles) run at a 7:29 pace in August.  I believe the York course is slightly tougher than the B2B.

The virtual partner function yields instantaneous feedback relating to how far ahead or behind I am of my goal pace.  When I simply used my 1/4 mile split times as a gauge for pacing, I had to wait for the close of every quarter mile to get a new split time and adjust my pace accordingly. With instantaneous feedback I can make pacing corrections much more rapidly - which should contribute to an improvement over my current 40:35 five mile personal record time.