However, I had a half marathon booked in York on the 18th January, and decided the extra rest could be considered tapering for this. Having not had a good run for a few weeks, I was sorely lacking confidence in the few days running up to the Brass Monkey half, but it was a dual purpose trip of visiting our friends Sarah and Chris- Sarah would be marshalling at the race as it was her club, the York Knavesmire Harriers race. http://www.yorkknavesmireharriers.co.uk/brass-monkey/
It started a few months ago with a rather swanky race entry system from resultsbase. This meant waking up to get online at 6am on a Saturday morning to try and get a place. When I logged in, I had 700+ people ahead of me in the queue! Unlike some other oversubscribed races, the entry system didn't crash and I was able to pay for and confirm my place in a matter of minutes.
For those who forget about races they enter it was exciting to then receive my race number and timing chip in the post. A Facebook post featured, and I hoped that the ankle would heal in time.
Saturday morning arrived and we started to make our way to York, via Oxford as I had a boat club society meeting to attend. It had been an incredibly heavy frost and the temp guage on my car said -5degC. Luckily I had gone out early to defrost the windows and windscreen, not that it helped much by the time we were ready to drive. We had quite a slow drive toward Oxford and somewhere on the m25 I realised I hadn't packed my race number! Face palm.
It's been so long since I'd done a race where the number is sent to you, or a race away from home that the idea of packing the race number didn't cross my mind. Although painting my nails on Friday night did!
Frantic Facebook messages to the organisers and I got a message to email the results base company who never replied. I text Sarah and she contacted the race director. They each gave me some reassurance but no guarantee that there would be some spare numbers in the morning. I was sure that there would be a solution.
As we continued our drive up to York, the expectation that the temperature would rise diminished, as we drove through several snow flurries. On arrival at Sarah's the boys watched a football match whilst Sarah and I walked the dog. We discussed my goals for the race, and I told Sarah that I'd be disappointed if I didn't manage sub 1:40, but in my mind I was really aiming for sub 1:38. Neither of which I was overly confident about as I had struggled to pick my pace up to sub 8mm in my last few runs.
Even with two layers of gloves on for this short walk, my fingertips started to tingle, and when we returned home, my hands and feet were plastered to the radiator desperately trying to reward them whilst Sarah prepared a lovely dinner of spag Bol - perfect pre-half marathon food. I even broke my dry January for a couple of glasses of red wine with my meal, which went straight to my head!
We all settled down to watch TV and then a movie, but I went up to bed shortly after the movie started to get my pre-race sleep.
Race morning and an early start to get my kit on and eat some porridge. Another Knavesmire harrier gave us a lift to the race hq, and since they were both marshalling we had to be there extra early, which meant I was the first to arrive to claim a spare number. All I had to do was give my name, age and a few other details and these would be assigned to my new number. At least that worry could go away now.
I left it as late as I could to drop my bag and in doing so bumped into Becks, who used to be a regular at Colchester parkrun, but now lives up north. So funny how small the running world is sometimes. When you travel so far for a club run road race, you don't expect to see people you know, but I saw another in the starting pen; Caroline, who had been on the 2nd placed Ladies team at TR24 and has a championship place for the London marathon. She was going for 1:29 and told me off that my target of 1:40 was too conservative. I agreed but knew my fitness had dipped in the last few weeks. I knew I wanted to target a 7:30 pace, but ultimately I was going to set off slow in mile 1 and see where my pace settled when I got into the swing of things.
In fact it did settle around 7:30 and my breathing was fine. I felt like this was a conservative pace but I would stick with it as everything felt comfortable, I wasn't getting too hot with all my layers, but I also didn't feel too cold. I knew that painful fingers would really ruin it for me, so I was glad of that. I settled into the pace and at about 3.5 miles the first water station came up. I was trying my torq energy gels out and so had a rhubarb and custard one to sip on for the next mile. Unfortunately, shortly after the water station there was quite an icy stretch. The combination of not being able to get traction and trying to take on fuel meant that my pace slowed quite a bit, but i got it back. Unfortunately the icy sections came back and there was at least 2 miles where I just couldn't get into a rhythm because of this. With 1700 runners on the course, I thought they would have been able to grit, but unfortunately not.
I decided to get my head down and make the best of it, but by the second water station Just after half way I was a bit pissed off by it all to be honest. I took my water cup and walked with it whilst trying a guarana torq gel. I don't usually get on with the flavour of caffeinated gels, and this was no exception, so the gel pack went down with my water cup. Luckily, beyond this the road was runnable, and where I saw people slipping and sliding, there was enough mud on the road bank that I could run on this, and get my pace back. I felt nice and strong, but was passing people all the time and struggling to find anyone going at the right pace that I could stick with. I suppose the ice affected people unevenly, and looking at other peoples splits and reports of the race this is definitely true.
At 10 miles I still felt really strong, which tells me I took the first part too slow. When I race a half marathon well I'm usually just trying to hold on from this point on, but it all felt a bit too comfortable. Of course I didn't want to take my mind off what I was trying to achieve either, and I thought that a 1:38:xx time was still achievable here and if I could ramp it up I may even sneak that sub 1:38 I was looking for. As I was ramping up, I got bunched in a couple of times, and in the last mile and a half there was quite a big (relative to the rest of the race) hill up over the bridge. My hill running legs weren't packed so this didn't help my ramp up, and as I tried to speed up for the last mile, my injury decided to say hello by tightening my calf. It felt like it could have gone into a very aggressive cramp, so I took my foot right off the gas. Unfortunately, this meant that I didn't achieve my real target, but still managed the sub 1:40. 1:39:22 to be precise, and a pb.
Incredibly impressed that despite my race number faux pas. The result was still texted to me within a minute of crossing the finish line:
After finishing I bumped into Sharon who had an amazing sub 1:35 time! She's running really well at the moment, and when I saw Caroline stretching off, she had achieved a pb as well! 1:28:xx. She certainly deserves her championship place.
I booked in for a quick sports massage as I was quite worried about my calf and ankle, but other than a particularly tight, painful trigger point in the calf, there is nothing serious, so I just need to keep managing it with RICE and MICE.
Having looked at my splits for the race, there is definitely room for improvement. When I race well, splits stay even unless elevation means they shouldn't. This was a flat enough course that the splits should have been even Stevens, but they weren't:
1: 7:34
2: 7:29
3: 7:30
4: 7:46 ice
5: 7:43 ice
6: 7:39 baby
7: 7:40
8: 7:23
9: 7:35
10: 7:28
11: 7:37
12: 7:22
13: 7:30 darn hill and cramp
0.2!! 7:11
Looking back, I also could probably have gotten away without stopping for water. If I had known it would be cups, I would have worn my ultra vest so I could drink water effectively! And for a first try in a race, torq gels don't seem to work for me; I think I'm better off sticking with something isotonic, and I will save the torq ones for the bike where I know I can carry a decent amount of water. A shame as they taste so much nicer and have more natural ingredients.
