Welcome to March team!
The time just flies and this time ,just catched me on the middle of getting ready for my first road race of the year. It was back to November, when I saw one of those Facebook advert about The Big Half, the first Half-Marathon designed by the London Marathon team and crossing through my neighbourhood ,finishing just a mile from home,so this means ..no excuses! . I went to sign up straight away but the places were sold out already! Days later I got a notification to invite me in and register through good for age entry (1.45min for women’s and 1.30 men’s) so I did it! .Anyway ,there were places for neighbors,so I could do it too ,but I had registered already.
My plan was to get ready and break a sub 1.30min , having plenty of time to get proper tempo and speed workouts planned after Christmas to get on time for it, but it is never goes as it has been planned. Through Christmas period back in Spain ,I ran up the hills with snow ,using confortable shoes but those that I haven’t used for a while . The result…calf pain thinking that it wasn’t too much but ending with a pulled calf for a month. It is so difficult to know when you are clean to don’t get worse, but his time it took me over 3 weeks to feel ready for anything.
Second week of February was already, only 3 weeks for the race day ,but technically only 2 as the last one, You should drop the volume of training. I built up the amount of kms from 5k to 15km, but 10 days before the race, I was feeling that it would be hard to get the goal, because I was running 4’30” average for 15km and I needed to cut 20”every km to manage to make my aim. Crazy! the good thing, it was that I knew I can do it, run 4’ 10” /km or under still okey for me, but keep it during 21k, it would be a real challenge.
The race day arrived, feeling no ready at all to run that pace and also after a crazy week of snow, the training sessions wasn’t great and mentally I was ready to hear that the race it may be cancelled,but it wasn’t as the snow disappear just on time .At the start line at Tower Bridge, the route was looking beautiful ,specially having the sun up. First Mile 6’50”, happy with the pace,let’s keep it. The first 6 miles where smoothie,feeling great and strong ,but knowing that the hardest where up to the front. At mile 6 , I slowed down a little bit, around 8 seconds, but I was feeling already that my legs won’t make it all the way at that pace.
It was at Mile 10 when I lost all the hope to make my goal . My legs started to feel painful,really heavy and definitely they didn’t want to run quick at all. Last 3 miles were a nightmare,running almost at 8min/mile ( 4.40min /km),feeling that I was missing the nice feeling and the power that I got at the beginning.
Finish line, 1.38min, 4min more than my PB and 8 min more than my goal. Annoying with myself but at the same time knowing that I “didn’t study “enough for it. Train the pace with long tempo runs and long distance sets are the key to train this distance to get you goal dome and I didn’t do many of this previously ,so the result was kind of expected.
In Conclusion, I know many of you can think it is a good time and yes,it is , but everyone wants to improve theirselves every time and me too! However, every race it is a unknown land, they only thing that we can do, it is get ready for it as much as we can.
Have a great week !
Miriam
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