Bristol Half Marathon

A couple of weeks ago, I made my return to Bristol for the half marathon, a race that has now become the 2nd biggest half in the UK with some 16,000 entrants. The last time that I ran this race, I was fit but got injured on the course and ended up coming home a bit later than I had hoped, so I suppose you could say, I had some unfinished business on this course. The course is designed for a good time, especially with the new finish layout that involved going round the centre of Bristol with good crowd support - exactly the time that you need to have some support.

I had decided to make use of the Garmin GPS watch on this occasion and to set up the training partner feature and then try and run with the watch for the whole race. The watch had me set on a 1:20:30 pace, which, if I am totally honest, was extremely optimistic giving my current run fitness. Anyway, the watch and I started out well and we were ahead of schedule for a long time, at 10k we were about 40s up on the scheduled time, but there was no denying that I was starting to fade. Over the next 11k that 40s second advantage slowly eroded, to be honest, it very quickly eroded when my legs were giving up. Before I knew it, I was behind my pacemaker and he was 'virtually' running off into the distance.

At the end of the day, I came across the line (in agony) in 1:22:40 which sounds like a disaster compared to my target time. However, in all honesty, I was actually pretty pleased. I had not exactly done a whole lot of half training and my recent training for the Vitruvian was all just based on being able to run at a steady speed, rather than actually at speed. It is however almost 3 minutes slower than my PB which I set earlier this year....albeit, that race and that course could not have been more perfect on that day.

So, the winter campaign of learning to run again will start soon. The new job is proving to be a complete hindrance at the moment though and I am just not getting into any kind of decent training programme. Things should settle down soon though and I think I should be okay in the end.