Upon moving to Austin to work at National Instruments I learned that I had just missed the Capitol 10K.  It happens to be the largest 10K race in Texas (over 20,000 runners last year) and stirs up a lot of excitement in these parts.  I bring this all up now because the Cap10K, as it’s affectionately known, is right around the corner (kind of) at the end of March.  There was already an info session about the race (yes, in mid January) to start building interest.  With this race, NI recruits a team to take part in the race’s Corporate Challenge.  That’s where I come in.

Since 2005 National Instruments has entered a team in the Cap10K Corporate Challenge.  The idea is to garner some blood-thirsty* friendly competition among local companies.  Each team consists of up to ten participants.  The top five fastest times from each team are totaled, and the team with the lowest total is the winner.  Our team has been rather competitive having won the event six years in a row.  It used to be close, but last year we won by 35 minutes**.

I have decided to put delusions aside and try out for the team.  As a baseline (so not to look like a fool when trying out) they recommend you should be able to run a sub-40 minute 10K (aka really fast), and I’m not so sure I can even make that cutoff.  There are quite a few speedsters here at NI, so between six and eight spots are already “reserved”.  For the rest of us who are right on the cusp there will be a friendly blood-thirsty race to determine the people who will be bringing up the rear of the team.

The tryout is going to be a 5K race between everyone who is on the edge of speedy but not quite a lock to be on the team.  The top finisher(s) will fill the remaining spot(s) on the team.  We’ll see how it all shakes out considering the Austin Marathon is 2 weeks before the tryout and I have done exactly zero speedwork since ever.  Come on natural ability!  As always, since this is epically important, I’ll keep you updated on this here blog.

*you’re going down, Intel!

**For reference, a very good 10K time is around 42 minutes.  You start getting into the “amazing” zone around 36 minutes.