Race Pace

Recreating a race pace effort during training is difficult to do when training alone. Powering Muscles gives you 10 Ways to Train Your Brain for Better Performance to prepare your body and mind for a race day effort.

I typically feel that I can push myself when working out alone but nothing compares with a little competition, perceived or real.

This past weekend I competed in my first 10k run, the Doug Kessler Lightning 10k. I wanted to not only know my time but to compare my heart rate to my cyclocross training. It's hard to recreate the intensity of a cyclocross practice or race with any type of cross training activity but knowing my race pace and heart rate for a run and the perceived effort is a good starting point.

My finish time for the run was 50:46 and average pace of 8:07. Here is a comparison of my heart rate with Sunday's cyclocross practice.

Cyclocross practice was broken down into two 1x10 minute effort and a 1x30 min effort.

1x10

• Average 154
• Max 168

1x10

• Average 142
• Max 168

1x30

• Average 161
• Max 169

Doug Kessler Lightning 10K

• Average 160
• Max 176

Compared to my earlier runs my heart rate was never as close as my race day numbers. Working in some high intensity intervals would seem to help my race day performance.