That’s one down and 13 to go! In a time of 2:00:26.
But I have to say I’m a little disappointed. My main goal was a 1:57-ish finish, and my second was a sub 2-hour run. Not to even break that barrier, and to finish even slower than my last half marathon (albeit by just 5 seconds), is very frustrating.
Overall, it was a great day for a run on a quite challenging, hilly, course around the Sydney CBD. I felt my overall preparation in the months leading up to it had been good - I’d give it a solid 90%+ mark - but my failure to make any real dent in my weight, my inability to find the 2-hour pacers at the start-line or during the race, and the unexpected difficulty of the course, all contributed to an outcome that was below expectations.
The key points:
Pre-race plan: As advertised, the plan was to stick with the 2-hour pacers until at least 15K, and depending on how I felt at the time, either leave and go for a 1:57 or so, or hang on for the best sub-2 hour time I could get. Of course, this all fell apart when I couldn’t find the pacers, so it was a case of just muddling through and making my own pace with absolutely no clue of how I was tracking. I didn’t wear a watch, but even if I had, there were no distance markers on the course. I had a rough idea of where half-way was, and a couple of other landmarks, but really no idea about my pace.
Weather: The forecast for race-day was for light winds, a 30% chance of a shower, and a maximum of 20 degrees with a minimum of 15. As it turned out, light rain was falling when I left home just after 5:00am, but it was dry, albeit a little overcast, when the race started. All in all, very good running weather. Certainly no excuses on that front.
Course: It was quite a different circuit from the Sydney half marathons I’d run in past years. All those had consisted of two loops of the northern part of the city with the start/finish area down on the harbour near what is now Barangaroo. This one-loop course started and finished at Hyde Park, and went out to Pyrmont before coming back to the city, and finishing off with the tricky run down and back to Mrs Macquarie’s chair. As I was to discover, the course contained quite a few reasonably short, but challenging, hills punctuated with longer flat stretches. A couple of days prior, I’d wandered down to the 15-16K mark in Kent Street, leading onto the Harbour Bridge ramp, and picked out the spiral loop down onto the Cahill Expressway, just after a longish incline, as probably the place to break from the 2-hour pace group. If I was up to it, of course.
Nutrition strategy: It had been a reasonably clean couple of weeks leading into the race, while in the couple of hours before the start on race morning I’d had a banana, bottle of Gatorade, and a gel. I also took a gel at the start line and decided against carrying one with me through the race. In terms of weight, my initial hopes of a sub-90 kilogram race weight proved forlorn when I weighed in at a tick over 94 kilograms early on race morning. Very disappointing and obviously something I need to keep working on.
Clothing: I decided to buy a new specialist running t-shirt a few days before the event. It’s a fairly garish lime and grey number but fits reasonably well. I would have liked to have reprised the old faithful shirt that I wore in each of my marathons, but it was looking a little worse for wear, and I thought maybe it’s just time to start a new tradition. I also wore compression pants (to the knees) for the first time in a race. I’d finally bought some a few weeks previously after thinking about doing so for some time, and they seemed to work well in the longer training runs. No complaints in the run itself either, although it meant an extra few seconds in the portaloo just before the start untying and tying them back up.
Pacers: Truth be told, after some great experiences with pace runners in many of my past races, I was a little apprehensive about them this time around. At the 2014 Gold Coast half marathon, I lined up where the 2-hour pacers were advertised as being, and by the time the gun went off, they were nowhere in sight. I ended up seeing them at the turn-around points way ahead, so obviously I hadn’t lined up far enough in front.
In addition, for this race, I was allocated in the green start group, which is described as “the first open group with no qualifying time required. Participants wishing to run the length of the course but have no prior race time are encouraged to enter into this group. This group is for those wishing to complete the course sub 140mins”. Next up the grid was the red group, which is described as being “for athletes who will complete the course in a qualifying time of sub 120mins”. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet the quite challenging qualifying criteria to get into that one, but I imagined there was a risk the sub-2 hour pacers would place themselves there and I would need to catch up to run with them.
Of course, in the half hour or so before the start, I learned for the first time that the different coloured groups would actually be starting at different times, with a few minutes separating each one, presumably to reduce congestion in some of the narrower sections of the course. Which started me worrying that if the pacers were in the red group, I’d never catch them. As it turned out, they must have been in the red group, because search as I might, I didn’t see any sign of them in the green starting pack - or anywhere else for that matter!
I thought I’d also share some interesting stats about my last two half marathons:
Sydney (May 2015)
• Race weight: 94kg
• 30-week running base: 995K (avge 33K/week)
• 60-week running base: 1,682K (avge 28K/week)
• Time: 2:00:26
Gold Coast (July 2014)
• Race weight: 93kg
• 30 week running base: 514K (avge 17K/week)
• 60 week running base: 574K (avge 10K/week)
• Time: 2:00:21
I'm not sure if it means anything much, but I'll keep track of this sort of information going forward and see where it leads.
Lessons learned?
Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight! Enough said.
Avoid putting all one’s eggs into one basket. The absence of the pacers threw me completely. I had no real idea how to pace the run and just settled for following some runners who were travelling at what I thought was a good pace for me, especially up the hills. But just thinking about, and guessing, how fast I was going was a major distraction. I need to get better at asking some ‘What if?’ questions.
The process works. It’s not really a lesson learned, rather one reinforced. I was able to sustain the effort when I needed to and recover after ascending a couple of very testy hills. So I’ll stick with it for a while yet.
And, finally, a big shout-out to my student colleagues and first time half marathon runners - the amazing Steph and Julie. Great job, both of you.
Onward and upward!
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