Half marathon redux

Still standing

The start

I set a new PW (personal worst) of 1 hour 40 minutes for the half marathon today but was quite pleased. It was my first half marathon race for ten years and I had lost only 8 minutes from my time when a guest competitor at the World Medical Games in 2003.  I am now running 26 minutes slower than my PB from 1987.  But the rate of decline seems to be less rapid than it was so I might still be able to do a sub-two-hour half marathon by the time I am 80.

Half marathons always seemed a good distance, no long training runs required and recovery measured in days not weeks. I have run about twenty half marathons over the past thirty years, most of them when in my thirties and forties and, unlike marathons, they never felt like they were taking over your life.

I entered on the day, having decided during a 9 mile run earlier in the week that I was going well and should perhaps forget my pride and test myself in a race. I searched online for a half marathon in August, found the Helensburgh one and decided to get it over with. I set myself a couple of targets: 1 hour 50 minutes which I thought achievable from my regular 6 and 8-mile exercise runs, and 1 hour 45 minutes which would push me and I used this target to set my split times. By 5 miles I was 2:40 up on my targets and by 10 miles, I was 4 minutes up. Could I gain another minute on the last three miles which included a hilly mile and a mile into the wind?  If so 1 hour 40 minutes, which was way beyond expectations, was possible. I tried and pulled back a few places over the last three miles but whilst the breathing was easy, the former dependable drive in the legs was no longer there.

When racing regularly my times were very consistent.  After a fast start, I would tag along behind the leading group, I usually had a bad patch between 2 and 4 miles. Thereafter I was metronomic in my running speed and usually pulled back a lot of places. But not today, I started steadily - 7 minutes for the first mile - decided to slow slightly for the next three miles but then could not find my overdrive for the last 9 miles. I lost places until 8 miles and only began to pull back over the last 4 miles as many of the runners began to fade. I was tired and stiff afterwards but, as another older club runner had said sagely at the start, "you will enjoy it better if you forget the fast lane and your old times and start to carve out a new time commensurate with your age."

All the symptoms of racing were still there: feeling heavy-legged before the start, tying shoes once, twice, three times to get the right pressure, listening to all the reasons why people would not go well, struggling to fix the race number with safety pins, deciding what shoes to wear, did I need vaseline because I didn't have any and how much to drink before the start. I was not helped by having to abandon the queue for the toilet because the start was imminent. Finally, I could find no-one I knew to race against. Only near the finish did I see one of my old sparring partners from Bellahouston Harriers.

Nevertheless, I was impressed by the excellent organisation by Helensburgh AAC, registration took less than a minute, the stewarding was spot on as were the mile markers, three watering points were provided and it was a well-signed route with much encouragement from the good citizens of Helensburgh. The real difference from the half marathons that I had done in the past was the far greater proportion of women runners and the high number of runners zoned into their iPods.

Bring me a beer, please