I’d like to patent what I’ve come to refer to as the ‘chicken and egg approach to PBs’. It’s worked pretty well for me so far in that every race I’ve done has been an improvement on the last. Allow me to explain this almost meaningless and very tenuous metaphor.
In my first ever 10k I had no idea how fast (or slow) I was going to do it and so I gave my one-man support crew an estimate of 1 hour 10 mins. This meant that when I staggered over the line in 57 minutes we were both nicely surprised and he was fumbling to find the camera. A few races on and I’m much better at predicting what time my hot bath and cup of tea should be ready and waiting by, yet keen enough with my targets to allow me to knock a few minutes off my time.

Whether my most recent race is a 10k (chicken) or half-marathon (egg) I shove that time into the Runners’ World race time predictor, and then I shave off a couple of minutes for luck. In May I ran a 10k of 54 minutes. So I popped this into the predictor and it told me I could do a half-marathon in 1.59. Not content with that I knocked off a few minutes and hey presto 1.56 PB in the log book. This weekend I lined up for a 10k. So, I put last month’s half-marathon time in the calculator and it told me to aim for 52.37. And what do you know, I crossed the finish line in an official time of 51.06 (twitter followers will know that I forgot to stop my watch and had suggested an unofficial time of 51.30).

 If I’d been working solely from my last 10k time, I wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting to take 3 minutes off it yesterday. Obviously if I were to run another 10k in a few weeks I’d work off yesterday’s time – but I like the toing and froing between the two distances. It’s almost as though they’re in competition with each other and I’m just the puppet through which their battle is being waged.