I did it! After 12 weeks of training, it was time to see if the hard work pays or not.
Yesterday I did my 10K after exactly 34 trainings (3 trainings a week except this week and I missed one because of an ankle pain). This was the first time that I trained like this. I did races before but just for fun, without a particular training. This time, it was the opposite: I trained but I didn't do a real race (I just ran by myself because I didn't find any race at that date).
In my training program, I put 39 minutes as an objective but in reality, I just wanted to cross the 40 minutes barrier. So my goal yesterday was to do it the fastest possible of course but I really wanted to do it in less than 40 minutes (I would have considered that as a failure if I had not beaten that time).
I think the conditions were good but not optimal. It was cold (-4°C) and with wind (18km/h). But the ground was completely dry which was the most important for me.
Even if it was not a real race, I did it as it was one. The first thing was to eat a good plate of pasta 3 hours before the race. Around 11:30, I started with a warm-up of 3km with some active stretchings. Then it was time to start the 10K.
As you can see it in my intervals, I managed to be below 4'/km pace during the first 6 km. After that I didn't manage to go back below that pace. But the most important is that in the end, I did it in less than 40'! Really close but I did it!
My exact time is 39'48".
At the end, I can say that the training was useful. In 12 weeks, I improved my time by 3'22" which is almost a 10% increase. If you want to follow a similar training, I used the Zatopek training excel sheet. You just have to enter you best time on 2000m and your objective on 10K and it calculates everything for you. Moreover, you can choose between 3, 4 or 5 trainings a week.
Now that it's over, I don't know what I'm going to do. I want to do a race in Brussels at the end of May. It's the 20km of Brussels, a really famous race in Belgium. If I do it, I will train for it during 12 weeks so I have time before that. I don't want to just run because I find those trainings quite boring. If someone has an idea, feel free to share it in the comments!
Last word: a Steem Running Project was born a few days ago. If you have some interest in running (and I guess you have if you read this post until the end), you can check it out here.