Milton Keynes Half Marathon

The good news is, my season has now started, it seems like a such a long time ago that I was racing. The bad news on the other hand, is that the season has started with a race that just went from bad to worse.

I had set myself the target of running a 1:21 at the MK half this year, and although ambitious, I felt relatively confident that I might just sneak under 1:22. The starter holding us for a lot longer than I thought meant that I started off needing to go to the toilet and hence the first 6 miles I spent a lot of time trying to decide if the cost of nipping behind a tree for a wee would be worth the time lost. I decided to give it a miss and carried on for a bit longer...I went through half way dead on target at 40:30 but I knew that I was slowing down a bit. For some reason, I never really felt that great, kind of tired. I think most of that may have been due to the fact that I did some hard work during the week and never really recovered properly and then promptly went out and did a 60 mile bike ride on the Saturday. The ride seemed okay for the first 30 miles but after turning round and realising it was headwind, I quickly lost interest and generally just felt lethargic. Still, I didn't think it would cause too much damage.

At mile 9 in the race, the real problems started, my feet really started to hurt - a lot. I had bought some new socks in the week and these were obviously not for me....I could feel the blisters starting to appear and by mile 11 it felt like someone was scraping the skin off the bottom of my feet. Cue, a final 2 mile run/walk strategy to finally cross the line in 1:30.....not great.





So, I have Fleet half in a couple of weeks time now. Hopefully, I'll be able to have a better day there.

At least the season has finally started...