The Tilburg Ten Miles experience
As some of you might know, I have been running quite fanatically over the last couple of months. So far I have done the 10km at Rotterdam and the half marathon in Leiden (21km 97m). A colleague of mine, who lives in Tilburg, mentioned that the Tilburg Ten Miles was an exciting and challenging race and I never bat a way a challenge! So as a well known TV personality always says "Challenge accepted!" and I signed up for the race. It is 10EM (English Miles), which translates into 16.1km through the heart of Tilburg.
After having finished the half marathon of Leiden late May I really upped my training schedule for the full marathon later this year in October, trying to run at least 50km a week and usually on Sunday 30km+. This has been quite tasking on my both physically and mentally as well as I am completely drained after finishing the runs. So I decided to take the training schedule a bit light and doing 30km+ every other week. So the Tilburg Ten Miles was a nice training for me in my "off-week".
The course was actually quite straight forward, some nice long distances with some turns along the way. Below you can see the course that I ran.
I had a sort of gameplan for the TTM since it was just 16.1km I really wanted to give all and decided that I wanted to run 4.10min/km for the first 10km and then upping the pace 3.45min/km. But before I started I really had to use the bathroom and decided to not go, this proved to be quite a hassle while running as it actually really started to hurt later on (yes I know, quite stupid of me, next time I will give up my front spot in order to run with an empty bladder!). When I started to run, at least the beginning when I wasn't think of the full bladder it went quite well, but I didn't stick to my a aforementioned gameplan though. I just went with the crowd and try to stick with it and found myself running at 3.45min/km - 3.55min/km (15.2-16km/h) the whole time. I even peaked at 20.3km/h at some point which translates to 3.00min/km. I did tire out after a while but didn't feel broken at all, after finishing and drinking some fluids and eating fruit I felt pretty ok, but in the spur of the moment I just couldn't give anymore. I wanted to, but just couldn't. And looking back on the progress that I made I shouldn't complain either, many friends of mine say that I did super and considering I am just running for about 8 months now I am booking quite some progress, my first 10km run was in 41min03seconds and when you look at my split of the 10km in the TTM you can see it stands at 39min20sec so that is almost 2minutes faster already in only 4 months! Next year I will be trying to run the TTM under the hour. SO I have some rigorous speed training ahead of me!
Now for my results of the 2013 TTM:
The raw and clean times are calculated in the following way. Raw means from start signal till finish, but since you are starting a bit behind the actual start some time passes when you actually go over the start so the clean time is really when you pass the start till finish, so in this case it took me 26 seconds from my position to go over the start. (I hope this makes sense)
| Name | Jasper de Joode |
| Town | Zevenbergen |
| Distance | Brabants Dagblad Tilburg Ten Miles |
| Category | Mrec |
| Total place | 131 / 5410 |
| Category place | 19 / 3016 |
| Speed | 15,110 km/uur |
| 5 km | 19:23 |
| 10 km | 39:20 |
| 15 km | 59:37 |
| Raw time | 1:04:20 |
| Clean time | 1:03:54 |
And of course, not to be missed a picture of my medal, which makes the count stand at 3 so far this year.
