Innothon 10 km was held on 2019-10-26 at Hong Kong Science Park, which was my first running race after my 1-year break in running. I did it as part of my plan to run a half marathon in November.

I started serious training 3 weeks before the race, running about 2 – 3 times per week, most commonly including a long run and an interval run, and another format if I ran 3 times in that week, with weekly mileage of about 20 km.

The course was flat – I now only do flat races because a slope up slows me down very much, and I was targeting 0:50:00 compared to my PB of 0:48:34 in February 2018 before my break in running.

The race started at 08:00. I forgot to start my Garmin watch at the start, and only started it after about 1.6 km. At that moment I was already running at more than 13 km/h, with split times of around 4’30” per km. In the latter part of the race I was still keeping about 12.5 km/h, which meant I might even be possible to break my previous PB. Finally I crossed the finish line under 47 minutes.

The official result was announced a few days later. My official time was 0:46:36, which became my new PB, lowering it by about 2 minutes, or 4 L%. I was placed 11th out of 56 in my age group, and 8th out of 117 in the IT staff category. Judging by this time, my target of completing a half marathon within 2 hours becomes reality as long as I keep training.