They say "Don't do anything during a race that you haven't done while training" . But yesterday, I did almost everything different in my HM. I trained for a run/walk at 7 mins per K - and finished up running the first 13 klms non-stop at 6:30 mins per K before having to resort to run/walk. Anyway I have dropped my HM PB down from 2hours :37 to 2:29 (for my second HM) and then down again to 2:23 yesterday. I intended to run the first couple of K until the traffic thinned out a little and then start run/walking. They had a 2:20 pacer and a 2:30 pacer and I wondered how I would be able to utilise the services of the 2:30 pacer seeing as how I would be run/walking. But, right form the start , I never really saw much of the 2:30 pacer and kept bumping into the 2:20 pacer ( who was being followed by a "gaggle of girls" ), many of whom I knew from parkrun. So I paced alongside them. Found it to be good fun , talking to them, and was fairly comfortable at a 6:30 mins per K pace. Time went by and I kept with them - running non-stop- until I realised that I stood a chance of breaking my 10K PB when I saw the 10K marker coming up - so I went ahead of them and broke that PB by over 5 mins!! - waited for them to catch me up and started to think that perhaps I could run the full HM non-stop. Anyway - started having problems with my feet going numb at around 13K and tried to shake the problem off by run/walking. It did help - but I also started to tire around 18K and fell off the pace . Eventually finished behind the 2:20 pacer and his "gaggle" by 3 mins , finishing in 2 hours 23 mins - 6 minutes faster than my previous HM last year. This WAS a fast and flat course though and ideal for PB's!!
I did a bit of reading during my 9 day South Pacific cruise taper - and had decided to start to do some more long slow distance running for the next several months as I believe that I have been doing too much interval training on top of an insufficient aerobic base. My inability to go past 13K while running non-stop yesterday has proved that to me - so I will now look for a beginners non-stop HM training programme, not to necessarily run another HM ( I think my max distance is really around 10 miles) but to simply do some volume of LSD running. Kind of looking forward to doing it .
Written by
Bazza1234
Graduate10
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Wow, I am very impressed Bazza, very well done to you what was your 10k pb time? I am not sure whether I could ever achieve a HM! I was interested in your comment about talking during your run. I must admit I found it quite annoying yesterday when I found myself running alongside two people who were having a conversation. I found it disturbed my concentration. I am so used to running alone, maybe that's why.
I got a 10K split time (for the first 10K) of 1hour 6:46 during this HM. Strangely, my 5K and HM PBs have always lined up with one another - but my 10K PB was always "slower" than it should be and still is. I think that through inexperience of the 10K, I may have been a little TOO conservative when running 10K races and I am now feeling that perhaps I could have done even better than this current PB (as I did that while doing quite a bit of talking to people I was running with) - maybe my "conversational zone" pace has moved up a little???
Actually, I regard the ability to run and maintain a pace while in full conversational mode to probably be the MOST important skill to develop.
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Blow me !!
First half marathon of the year, big PB 👍🏃♂️
