Today was the Day

As usual I was up early after a not so good nights sleep. Today was race day, my 3rd half marathon and my sons Hive account@supertraff 1st half marathon. It was a lovely morning, blue skies, sun shining but quite a strong easterly wind.

Last year I ran this race for my first half marathon and I wasn’t going to do it again as I ran a good time better than I’d hoped at 2 hours 7 minutes but my son wanted to do it so I signed up with him. As the day got closer he wasn’t very enthusiastic about it and didn’t train for the longer distance. I on the other hand trained really well until about a month ago when the weather changed, I lost my motivation to go out in the cold and spent more time in the gym rather than running.

All I wanted to do was beat last years time even if only by a second but unfortunately that wasn’t to be. Disappointing but I’m not too unhappy as I still ran a half marathon, not many people go out and do that. I’m not a natural runner, I do have to work hard at it and I’ve been struggling with my body hurting, my feet hurting, not sleeping well and quite a bit of things going on in my personal life so it’s hardly surprising that I found it hard.

I started well, pacing myself as I wanted for the 1st 6km, Hive account@supertraff ran with me as he didn’t want to go off too fast as he hadn’t ran more than 12 km before he didn’t really know what pace to run. The race itself was 3 laps of 7km around the track. I’d hoped to not go over a 6 minute km but that went totally out the window. The first lap was good even though I struggled with stitch and pins and needles in my fingers. The second lap was slow but still acceptable until about 12km when I got the worst stitch ever, then after that it got worse and worse until the last 2 km’s when I knew I was nearly there and I didn’t have to run over the awful bridge again. The course was pretty flat being a Race Track but there was an awful bridge that went over the track that we had to run over 6 times, it’s an absolute killer! The last lap when I had to go over it twice I really didn’t think I was going to maake it, you can see this if you look at km’s 15 to 19.

After the second lap my son decided to give it a go and run off to see if he could get a better time. He did brilliant, he made up a lot of time and managed to finish 10 minutes quicker than me. Although he is suffering so much more with tiredness and aching now than me. I’m so proud of him even if he doesn’t ever want to un more than 10k ever again!

So now that’s done I’m going to have a few days off then back to the running plan, back on it ready for Manchester Marathon in 139 days. I need to train well I hav to get a pb.

Here’s my strava stats