The Bristol Half Marathon

After a few weeks of setting PB after PB, the Bristol Half was supposed to the last in the series, giving me a 5k, 10k and half marathon PB all in the space of seven days. Alas, this was simply not going to be.

On the day before the race, I went out for a little run around my mum's house, just doing some interval stuff and generally just giving the legs a warm up. About half way round I realised I felt a little sore in my left calf. Still, I carried on and made it home, hoping tha it would not be too much to worry about.

When I woke up on the day of the race, the twinge was still there, but I had raced with these litle things before and managed to make it through. I just hoped this would be one of little pains that you could deal with.

Anyway, the race got underway about half nine on a warm day in Bristol and it all looked good for a day's running. I had decided to take the first couple of miles at quite an easy pace, mainly because I wanted to see how things felt and I also did not want to start to fast. I was happily letting people overtake me because in the back of mind, I had this plan to start reeling them all in after about 6 miles.

After about 3 miles the calf had started to let me know that it was not too pleased, but I was still running about 6.30 miles which I was happy with. However, by the time I got on to the Portway, things had started to be a lot more painful and I started to come to the realisation that this was not going to to be my day for a new PB. Just after 5 miles, I finally stopped for the first time and immediately started to think that I would be best to just turn round and head back to the finish. As I turned round though to look at the road back to the finish, it seemed like something that would be too hard to do - think I would have been too ashamed to walk past all the crowds in all honesty. Hence, I turned back round and started to jog at a much slower pace, eventually finding a speed I could run at which did not cause too much discomfort.

Running at a pace below your race pace in a race is quite a strange thing. I started to actually look around and was trying to find one my mates on the other side of the Portway. The run back into Bristol was actually quite enjoyable, running under the suspension bridge and then along Anchor Road back to the finish. The crowds along this section were really good, the best I have ever experienced anyway.

I finally made it home in 1.31 which is only a minute slower than my time from Wokingham at the start of the year. That's pretty pleasing for a race where I actually only ran properly for 5 miles.

I may try and find another half to do before the year is out now. Really do want to see if I can average sub 4min km's for this distance.

Anyway, here's a video and some pics from the day..