8. Mitteldeutscher Marathon in Halle/Saale: 10km – 31:31min (4th place)

September 7, 2009

After coming back from my 4-weeks altitude stay on Friday I competed in a 10K the day afterwards, on 5th of September. Last year I competed in the German 10K-championships in the same situation, i.e. coming straight from altitude and 2 weeks before the Berlin marathon. Well, last year I ran a surprising 30:34, whereas this year I “only” ran 31:31min.

However, also the conditions were not as good as last year. Because the German 10K-road championships are next weekend and this would be a bit too late for Berlin I decided to run in the race that is organised from German marathon legend Waldemar Cierpinski (double Olympic Champion in the marathon). So I lined up with his son and World Championships 2009 participant Falk Cierpinski and many others for the 10K that was held in downtown Halle on a 1,7km loop.

The course was not the fastest, with some small hills and some parts that were covered with cobblestones. However, the main problem was that already after 2 rounds (i.e. 3 km) you had to run through the crowd that was lapped and with some 500 runners that’s not an easy task! The “slalom” course took quite some time and also it was not so easy to maintain the pace, running through so many people.

After all I was not unsatisfied with race. I ran constant lap times for most of the race and until around 7 km I was within the range of vision to the 3 leaders (Falk Cierpinski, the Slovak Miroslav Vanko and the Czech Jan Kreisinger). If I would have closed the remaining 15-20 meters it might have been possible that I would have been on the podium, but after 8km I could feel the muscular fatigue that was caused by the four weeks of altitude training in Kühtai and St. Moritz. Two weeks before the Berlin Marathon I didn’t want to destroy myself so decided to keep some energy and settle for 4th place.

TOP 10 of the mens category in the 10K-race:
1 Cierpinski, Falk (GER) 30 SG Spergau e. V. 00:30:53
2 Kreisinger, Jan (CZE) HK 00:30:55
3 Vanko, Miroslav (SVK) 35 00:31:09
4 Haß, Erik (GER) HK SV Vorwärts Zwickau e. V. 00:31:31
5 Zabel, Michael (GER) 40 SG Spergau e. V. 00:32:14
6 Schmidt, Paul (GER) HK TSV Dresden 00:32:29
7 Soos, Daniel (GER) HK Budapesti Honvéd SE 00:32:31
8 Glauche, Eric (GER) HK SC DHfK Leipzig e. V. 00:33:18
9 Recksiedler, Raik (DEU) HK 00:34:24
10 Stoek, Holger (GER) 40 LAV Halensia e. V. 00:34:48
10 Bernstein, Christian (GER) HK SG Spergau e. V. 00:35:39 00:35:37