Well, as it turned out that Wilmslow Half-Marathon was actually nearly enjoyable. The weather yesterday was horrible, cold and rainy, and the less said about last weekend’s White Easter, the better. But today dawned sunny, if not exactly warm, and you know how a bit of sunshine on your back can perk you up.
I’d never run thirteen miles before in my life. A couple of weeks ago, my training programme called for a twelve mile run, and I got through the mileage, but only with a walk up the hill in Wilmslow Park. Today, however, it felt good from the start, and I knew even after a couple of miles that it was going to be OK.
My first target was nothing more than making sure I kept running from start to finish, and as it turned out there wasn’t a single moment when I was tempted to walk, which was really quite amazing when you think about how brutal my twelve mile run was a fortnight ago. I don’t know why that would be. I haven’t run for a couple of days, so maybe it’s that I’m rested, or maybe it’s because my routes through Wilmslow and Handforth all have nasty hills, while today the course was relatively flat. Or maybe it’s all the people around, and maybe it’s just the nice weather.
If I managed to make the first target, I was aiming for 2 hours 15 minutes, and ended up with a time (by my watch, not my official time) of 2 hours 6 minutes and 38 seconds. Actually, now that I think about it, if I was running all the way, it would have been difficult to go as slow as 2:15. 2:06 represents a pace of 9.67 minutes per mile, or 9.95 km/h, so I basically kept (fractionally below) my typical pace for the full 13.1 miles. Chuffed!
On the last mile, my hips were aching a bit, but I had none of the problems from my ankle, knees, shoulder or feet that I’d had during training. I was even thinking “you know, I could tackle a longer distance than this if I wanted to…”
But that has worn off now, thank goodness, and I think it was the endorphins talking, and I’ve found it hard to dedicate the time to this, so a marathon might be a step too far. It would be nice to do the Manchester 10K in a significantly faster time though…
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