A hard but satisfying return to road racing

I ran the inaugural Surrey Half Marathon on Sunday. My chip time was bang on 1:23 so this was my slowest time - admittedly only by a few seconds, and I have only done three HMs. So why am I happy not to have run any faster?

After a productive autumn of road racing, knocking out my first two half marathons and three ten-milers plus some other bits and bobs, and seeing a good progression in times, I had planned to run a spring marathon. Given my race times I was hoping that a solid couple of months of training would mean I could have a realistic crack at something around 2:50 - bearing in mind that I haven't run a road marathon before, so I don't really know how I'd fare.

I then had a flare-up of a long term hip whinjury that I has been lurking in the background since Spring last year so I put my marathon plans on hold.

Trying to run fast

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love road racing

Crikey, this blog post is rather delayed... I had meant to finish and publish it about a year and a half ago. Oops. I will finish this section and publish it now... 

I had deliberately not planned any ultras or other epic shenanigans for after the Gore-Tex Transalpine so I could just see how I felt afterwards and see what I fancied doing with the rest of the year. Despite having run to some extent for almost two decades, I have never got round to doing much road racing so I decided I'd find some local races to take part in during the autumn: this would hopefully provide a new challenge, motivating me to train, and would also take up less time during the weekends than training for or running ultras.

True to form, I didn't do this in a very structured manner: I just decided to find a bunch of local races and have a crack.  In particular, I thought I'd enter a half marathon, since I'd never done one before.  A colleague had mentioned the Ealing Half Marathon so why not?

All in all I ended up taking part in two 10ks, three 10Ms and two half marathons, with a couple of Parkruns, a couple of cross country races and a 24M fell running challenge thrown in for good measure.

Following the Transalpine race, it took a couple of weeks for my immune system to recover from the lurgy I had suffered from during the event.  Two weeks of relative rest probably did my fitness no harm, and also gave my muscles, tendons, etc a chance to recover from eight hard back-to-back days in the mountains.  From past experience, I have a tendency to injure myself by not resting sufficiently after hard off-road events - I tend to get over-excited and fail to rest - so at least this time I didn't have a choice!  I had also had a slight recurrence of the hip and groin injury that had beset me during the summer.  This was frustrating and puzzling in equal parts: why on earth had the whinjury been fine during the Transalpine yet problematic on gentle road runs since?  (Answers on a postcard to the usual address).

A low key charity 10k organised by 'For Crohns' gave me a chance to test my fitness and to see how the whinjury held up to more intense running.  The ol' war wound felt stiff during the warm up but it didn't bother me during the race.  Running fast - or trying to - was a bit of a shock to the system, but I managed to gradually move my way through the field into 3rd place, clocking 37:18 (a PB by about a minute but my previous PB was on a hilly Crystal Palace course).  I am not sure whether I can honestly say that I enjoyed the race - it felt like really hard work!  I was gasping for breath, my heart was thumping, my lungs were struggling, and I felt generally knackered.  Definitely Type 2 fun, and something a plodding ultrarunner was unaccustomed to. 

Next up was the Ealing Half Marathon (29 Sept).  This was my first half marathon and I hadn't done any specific training but I figured that I should have decent endurance still, so sub-1:25 was doable.  Probably more by luck than judgement, I managed to pace the race reasonably well.  According to my GPS, which cannot necessarily be relied on too much on such a wiggly course, my pace per mile varied between 6:05 and 6:31 but the course was undulating as well as twisty so I was reasonably pleased.  Again, the race felt fairly uncomfortable but I was starting to get a perverse enjoyment from the controlled struggle to run fast - or at least fast for me!  I got round in 1:22:54 and was definitely buzzing afterwards.

Real life got in the way for a couple of weeks but on 20 October I entered the 10M 'Beat the Hour' race in Hyde Park.  I didn't realise until just before the race but there was going to be a pacer running one hour pace.  Since I was expecting to run a minute or so slower than the hour, I didn't feel brave enough to take a risk and try to keep up. In the end I finished narrowly missing the hour which rather surprised me - pleasantly! It was perhaps a shame that I didn't have a go at following the pacer, but then it is always easy to think of improvements retrospectively. 

To be continued...