ED 10 km Eindhoven Recap

After last years 5 k in Eindhoven I had decided not to participate again in this race, since I did not like the way it was organized. But this year this marathon event added an extra race distance, the 10 k. Like the 5 k, there are no starting waves for this distance (I still don’t see why not), but unlike the very popular 5 k, there were less participants for this distance (about 2.200). I made sure I got there early so I would be near the front when the race started. But I got a bit carried away with the other runners near the front, which were obviously faster runners than I am, so early in the race my lungs started to hurt.

At around the 3 k mark I noticed there were no kilometer signs along the route at all and since I don’t have a sports watch I didn’t really know for sure how far I had already run and if I was going fast or slow. But since my lungs were still hurting I figured it wasn’t going to be a PB race.

I did enjoy the route, though, the race started off at a wide street which made it easy for the runners to pass one another and spread out quite quickly. After this the route went through a park and took the more scenic industrial-heritage route back into town.

But when you’re about 1 km from the finish line you go through the part of town with all the bars and cafes, which were all packed with people and there wasn’t that much space left to run. This is the part where the crowd has a lot of comments about your performance while watching you with a beer in hand. It’s one of those moments when I do not like it that my name is on the bib. Actually, I mainly do not like it that my name is on the bib, since people always seem to have comments about me walking during a race. I know that most of the time people mean well, but it gets quite annoying when you get that many comments about it during a race when you really need to walk to get your heart rate down.

In the end I crossed the finish line after 1:16:13, a new PB! I didn’t expect that to happen, but it’s nice to finish your last race of the season that way. And I also liked the bling.