Monday, March 03, 2008

We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast..

For a PB !

An-early-season-unscheduled-my-last-race-as-a-39-year-old-34-second-improvement PB. Here's the quick and dirty race report:
Time: 1:24:51
Place: 8th in AG, 40th OA.

After some initial unsucessful attempts of trying to get in contact with Stu to relay a slight change in plans, sand-bagger Aaron and I lined up near the front of the line for the Burlington Chili Half Marathon. Just us and 2000 of our closest friends.

At the gun, we took off, we took off fast. Too fast. But hey, it's a half marry and if you are trained for it, you should be able to redline the sucker the whole way. Well, close to redline. Go check Aaron's report about redlining- hehe. He was going for a massive PB and in the back of my head I was thinking that if he could run with me for the first bit, he may just 'buy' enough time to do it. Did he? Well, you'll have to read his report and find out.

I haven't done any speedwork this year and now I'm telling my legs to run fast. They complained the whole damned time! I mean complained loud.. as in 'hey dude, stop now!!' And this was only at 2km marker! Great, 19k to go with legs that don't feel like cooperating.. gonna be a fun ride.
Split at 5k: 19 flat. Yup too fast. But the back of the mind is saying.. 'hey, if you keep this up......'
Split at 10k: 39 min. Lost a minute, but have a minute in the 'bank'. (I was aiming to run 4min/k for the race)
Split at 15k: 1hr. That minute in the bank is pretty much gone. Legs are really bitching now.
Finish: 1:24:51

Interesting to note the each of the 5k splits is a minute slower than last one. Perhaps not the best thing to do tactically, but in the end I did PB and I'm more than happy to take a PB in the beginning of March!!

Cheers!

2 comments:

Aaron said...

Anybody that can do mental math while racing and determine that they've lost time in splits is obviously not running hard enough. Clearly you left another five minutes "on the road". BTW, a 1:23:00 half-marry automatically qualifies you for the New York marathon, allowing you to skip the lottery.
Quit sand-bagging! :)

Anonymous said...

That is a nauseatingly fast time for a soon to be 40 year old!