Being very enthusiastic about the whole thing of trying to break my personal record, I decided to start with a 12-week training schema some 3 months ago. I started training in July when I was in holidays... so there was plenty of time to train and in July and the beginning of August, I kept up with the scheme quite well... but then, the first two weeks of August we went to France for the British Open paragliding championships and this somehow broke my training rhythm. After we got back from our holiday in France, I had to work again and there was less time for training... the only training-sessions I had were the 30 minutes easy runs together with Hanne, at quite an easy pace... and OK, I have to admit... it was not just because of a lack of time that I didn't train much anymore, i simply also was a bit lazy...
So... my preparation for this race was not ideal, but being a man of my word I decided to participate anyway. Last time, I also hadn't trained for it and for sure I was planning to reach my goal of 1:35:00. The task was easy: I had set up my Garmin Forerunner at 13.5 km/h and all I had to do was follow my Virtual Partner on that little machine! For the first two laps, I constantly was some 50m in front of my Virtual Partner... with a nice 4:30 min/km which would lead me to my personal record... This went well until around km 13 in the third lap where I started slowing down. I had been trying to follow Maaike Ryngaert in the second lap, and now I paid the price for that :-( Although not as fast as planned, I managed to stay below 5:20 from km 13 to km 17, but the last 4 km were just hell. My only goal during the last lap was not to walk, as I did in my first half marathon, thereby hoping to still run faster than my personal record 1:38:36. Knowing that my last 4 km were all somewhere between 5:52 and 6:00, it was quite clear that this race would not end in a personal record... I finished 270th out of 541 participants in 1:45:24.2 which is a weak 12.01 km/h... not something I should be proud of.
Lessons learned:
- If you want to perform well in a half marathon, you have to train!
- Trying to follow women who run faster than you is not good for your pace at the end of the race.
- Maybe I should just skip the Garmin Virtual Partner thing... all it does is make me run fast the first 10km and slow the last 10km...
Some pictures of the race can be found in my Picasa Album. You can also checkout my Garmin tracklog to see how I ran my first kilometer in 4:16.4 and my worst kilometer in 6:00.1.
