Today I ran my first Half Marathon – 3.1 miles more than I have ever done before! The longest run up to this point was a 10 miler a few weeks ago as part of my training for today's race.
I had 2 goals.... Finish in under 2 hours and be in the top 6,000 finishers that got a medal. The rain, wind and a crowded start did not make the first goal easy but I finished strong with just under 2 minutes to spare. And the medal is cool :-)
Here are my split times with comments for each mile of the race:
I did a pretty good job of managing my HR... My plan was to run hard for the first 3 miles, recover a bit during miles 3-9 and then start picking up the pace. And oh yeah, sprint once I can see the finish line :-) It turns out that that the race course was there to help me with a 2.5 mile downhill stretch starting at mile 5. My lap times only reflect my efforts to pick up the pace on the 9th mile... After that, wind and rain slowed me down despite my best efforts.
Here's the HR & elevation graph:
The course map is to the left... The route can also be viewed Google Maps and Google Earth using data from by Garmin GPS. As always, full MotionBased Data is available.
I trained hard for the Treasure Island Triathlon and was bummed when the swim portion was canceled at the last minute due to the oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. While I ran that race anyway, the whole point of doing a triathlon was to learn how to swim… So, I searched for another triathlon and found one over the Thanksgiving weekend down in LA called the Turkey Tri :-)
This was a harder race for me than Treasure Island and my legs were burning for most it :-/ Perhaps 2 weeks was not enough time to fully recover. And I had to swim this time and that is my worst sport. Plus, this was a longer race than Treasure Island: 10.95 mile bike, 3.2 mile run on a flat course vs. 0.6 mile swim, 14.17 mile bike, 4.68 mile run with hills.
So, here are my results for the 2007 Turkey Tri:
For comparison, here are my results for the Treasure Island race which show that I was about .75 mph slower on the bike and 1 min/mile slower running. On the plus side, my average HR is down about 4 beats and I lopped just over a minute off of my bike/run transition time!
My standings are not as good as I wanted since my goal was to be in the top half which I just missed by age and sex :-/
Graphically, these rankings look like as follows (my times are in RED):
For Google maps, elevation charts, speed graphs, etc, check out the following MotionBased links….
Swim: http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/4511375
Bike: http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/4511579
Run: http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/4511576
Here’s the HR graph with speed and cadence for the bike portion. My HR for the swim was higher than it should have been given how fast I was going and I’m guessing it was nerves :-/
Check out that max speed of 43.2 mph!!!
Photos still to come :-)
