Today I ran the Halstead Marathon, I have done this race 3 years in a row and always as this time I have run it as a training run. Just as last year I was doing as the last run in a 100mile+ training week.
My previous times were 3:44 and 3:42 I think and with a lot of miles in my legs I had the loose target of anywhere between 3:45 and 4 hours.
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| Great goody bag – I ate some other stuff.. |
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| Peter Johnson |
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| Jen Bradley aiming for the fastest fairy record |
After a bit I was running alongside a german runner I got chatting with and happily plodded along with him at around 8mm pace. His name was Roy and he had a previous PB of 3:55 and after running for a bit he decided he would try to stay with me and have a try at that PB and I was happy to go with that as I had no intention of pushing for a time. I pretty much ran just in front of him chatting to various runners I knew as I passed people or they passed us. Everything was going well with most miles around or just under 8mm. About 16-17 miles in Roy started to slow a bit and I hung back with him as I had spent time with him and wanted him to get his PB. At about 22 miles he really started to slow to 9:30’s and I knew he would PB easy so I let him know I was going to stretch my legs and go ahead. I picked the pace up back to 8mm and had a nice run in to the finish with a flat out sprint for the last .2 of a mile at 6:40 pace.
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| My sprint finish |
My final time (unnoficial) was 3:35:45 by my watch which is a nice 7 mins or so PB on this route so really happy with that knowing I had a bit left in the tank and could have taken maybe 5-6 minutes if I had pushed it hard.
All in all a really nice day out with great support from Sue (the missus) and others along the route and some great company at times on the route.
I was mostly fuelled by TORQenergy Lemon today and although I did bring some TORQgels I actually did not eat anything and ran the whiole thing on 500ml of energy and 500ml of DRPepper! with a few cups of water from the checkpoints. I was not working hard enough to really need much more to eat or drink.
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| TORQ Energy Fuel |
Taper time now with GUCR coming up in less than 2 weeks so I will have an easy week next week and may even get out on my mountain bikes for a few rides to keep activity levels up.
Laters…