Keeping up the run training since City2Surf I was worried on the Wednesday just before the big race that I was going down with something since I was aching and feeling slightly feverish. From that day on I did absolutely no training - call it tapering - but for me this was survival!!I made sure I got a good nights sleep on Friday night since I knew that with a 6.20am race start (yes - you're reading that right) and a friends 'Boogie Nights' the night before, the excitement pre-race you get, I wasn't going to be sleeping very much on Saturday night!
Luckily my office is just up the road from Sydney harbour bridge and so at 5am I was collecting a few others to drive the 20mins from home to the car park under our building.
Arriving at 5.30am you think you have plenty of time but with so many people there it took ages to drop of my post race plastic bag and then the line 20mins out from race start for the portaloos did not move fast enough so I had to cut 90secs into my run time by taking a pit stop at the 5km mark - not good.
The rest of the race was pretty good for me since I kept a fairly constant race pace and was starting to eat into the 90secs I lost. I thought I'd calculated it perfectly when I approached the 20km mark which was at circular quay (near Wildfire restaurant) but as I raced around the quay towards the opera house the seconds to my target time seemed to get smaller and smaller with no finish post in sight. I was really sprinting the final 200m and as my goal time (1:45) passed I remembered from our coach to be aware that the distance is actually just shy of 21.1k! Doh! That extra 100m meant I missed my target by about 12seconds!
Overall though I guess I was happy with my time for a first half marathon and after taking into account my health just before and my unexpected pitstop I felt my race result was very good.
For a few more photos taken by the official race photographers see this link. If I find any others taken by others I'll upload them :)
No comments:
Post a Comment