Alice Squizzoni reporting on her Skechers Performance Run
This weekend brought the fourth Skechers Performance Run of the season - a well run series with various distances to choose from, hosted out of the new Meydan golf and horse racing facilities.
The closed road course through this developing Dubai neighbourhood gave iconic views of the downtown skyline and the spacious palm tree lined route was an idyllic setting for my first running race in the city.
Being relatively new to running I wasn’t sure how to pace the 10km ahead of me - I normally just run and hope for the best! But Coach helped me split the race into two 5k chunks: the first, an easy pace I felt I could hold all day, the second, gradually increasing pace until the end.
Plan in place, the hardest thing to do was stick to it! With everyone lined up together on the start line, it was far too easy to get swept up in the adrenaline and keep up with the faster runners at the front. The result was I did the first km or so significantly faster than I intended, and really struggled to reign back the pace to follow the plan.
However, 5km later I was very glad I did! There was something very satisfying getting over the half way mark and having enough saved back that I could step up a notch with each km to go and end the last km with my strongest pace.
I was also glad I had practiced a little with gels on some of my long runs. I can’t reccomend enough the Stealth Real Fruit Mango & Passionfruit gels - they’re like a little burst of a fruit smoothie that gave me the perfect little boost of energy to keep going (and not at all chemically!).
Key takeaways for me from this race: stick to the race plan - and don’t start too close to the front of the pack with people you don’t intend to keep pace with 😂