A Half Marathon Run

I’ve been keeping this relatively quiet, but the Half-Ironman distance triathlon that I pulled out of last year is looming fast. I pulled out last year due to my plantar fasciistis injury but my entry was deferred for a year so I’m still signed up to do it. My foot seems better but I haven’t been training or racing this year thanks to a shoulder injury. Yes, I’m slowly falling apart as I get older. I would however like to at least do a Half-Ironman distance race one day so I think I might still do it this year and just take it easy with the hope of finishing it. The emphasis will most definitely be on completing not competing.

Swim

I have at least got back in the water over the past couple of weeks. My shoulder is still not quite right but I have now completed a couple of 1.2 mile swims in the sea so hopefully that won’t be a problem. I haven’t done any actual swim training in the pool since Christmas though so I’m expecting to start out as I mean to continue on race day with a nice easy paced effort. In other words, ‘slowly’.

Bike

Once again, I haven’t really been doing any proper bike training either. I’ve been out on the road a few times and I’ve been squeezing in Turbo Trainer sessions throughout the week as well but performances have been going downhill and times have been getting slower rather than faster. I did pop down to Pembrokeshire for a ride around the actual route of the race the other week. Under normal circumstances (if I were fit) I’d expect a 56 mile bike ride to take around 3 hours so would be hoping for just slightly less than that in a race situation. I may have to re-think those expectations though as it took me 3 and a half hours on my recce. It was a little lumpy and I wasn’t going flat out but I was also pretty tired after the ride and wouldn’t have been looking forward to running a half marathon, so it may have to take that long on race day as well.

Half Marathon Run

I had hoped that the longer runs I’ve been doing along the coast path would mean that my running would be OK. Trouble is those are all really slow thanks to the terrain and often involve a fair bit of walking. I’m also stopping every so often to take photos. Not ideal training for a half-marathon and not really a test to see how I’d do in a race situation. On top of this, I’ve had a fairly sore Achilles after any runs lately so I wasn’t sure how well I’d fare on a more sustained half marathon run. With that in mind, and a niggling uncertainty about being able to go the distance I thought that I’d better give it a go. So, with a small amount of trepidation and reluctance I set off on what was planned to be a half-marathon distance run on Saturday morning.

The conditions were good, a little windy at times but nothing too bad. I had quite a nice circular route planned, and in the end made fairly good time all things considered. In fact I was quite happy to have run the distance in 1 hour 37 mins-  around about 7:30 mins/mile pace. Not fast, and I doubt I’ll be able to do even that after a 56 mile cycle. My achilles was really sore afterwards as well so I will have to be careful but at least I know that I can at the moment do a non-stop 13.1 mile run.

I’ve just got to see if I can put it all together in a few weeks time.