Have I mentioned lately that the Healthy Kidney 10K is coming up?

Here’s a little pre-race exercise I like to go through in the days leading up to a big race. I like to review the race results from the previous year to try to figure out where I’ll fit in. It took a little work, but I compiled the results from 2008’s Healthy Kidney 10K in Microsoft Excel, complete with drop down menus (whatever, I’m an excel geek). Here…

healthy-kidney-2008-results

So there were 6,282 finishers in last year’s HK 10K. In a previous post, I gave you the tools to predict what your finish time will be this year. Assuming there will be a similar field of runners in 2009, let’s see where that puts you in the pack…

This race draws a pretty strong field for a “local” 10K. My goal time of about 38:20 puts me in the top 3% of finishers (roughly 190 out of 6,300). 1 in 10 runners post sub 7-minute miles, and 30% break 8 minutes, some respectable split times.

This might be a good time to discuss Age Grades.

According to Runner’s World, “age grading is a way of putting all race…