"building in public"

race retro and a new PR (?)

I ran the Davis Moonlight Run 10K last week! Surprisingly until now I had only run 10Ks in training, so it was my first time racing the distance. Quick retro: I went out faster than expected, panicked 20 minutes in that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up, but fell into a rhythm listening to the AI-generated playlist I made before the race (upbeat K-pop scaling from 165-180 BPM). I felt the struggle going into the last 1.5 miles, but was able to push through and race to the finish. Still felt I had some left in the tank by the end, so maybe I could’ve been better, but I was happy with the result: I came in at 50:35 gun time.

My PR from training was 54:20 so I expected to do better, but I was expecting ~52:00, not to beat it by another ~2 minutes. Unfortunately there was a catch. My Garmin Forerunner’s GPS came up about 0.2 miles short on the course, roughly 320m. So the official time counts, but Garmin Connect (and Strava) both didn’t recognize the distance or my PR. Annoyed that my best result has a question mark next to it in my own training log, but regardless I’m proud of the result.

keeping accountability

I started run.jtapostol.com (now redirecting to https://www.jtapostol.com/run) first to help myself keep track of my training and longer term trends. Then I started a private IG (now public), @run.jtapostol, to journal my runs. To be honest, it’s something that I could’ve done directly on Strava/Garmin Connect, but I wanted it to be easily accessible outside the running community and it also became a dedicated place to follow relevant brands, events, and other runners without distractions.

Unrelated, but starting the account helped me find a new feature to add to my running dashboard utilities. The Strava “Share” feature gatekeeps exporting the GPS route image for your most recent activity behind their subscription, so I built a small script to generate a similar image using Garmin’s GPS data to easily add to my posts. It’s a small thing, but it was a quick win and adds a nice touch to my posts.

what’s next

Urban Cow Half Marathon is in 2 months. My goal is to finish the race sub-2 hours as a performance milestone to reach a (semi-unrealistic) goal sub-4 hour marathon. I’m finishing up Week 5 of training, 100% on track with my first wrinkle ahead: going on a 5-day trip to Chicago (3 days where I’m supposed to run while spending full days at a music festival). We’ll see how it goes!