THE ROYAL PARKS HALF MARATHON - HOW MANY PEOPLE? HOW MUCH RAIN?

I've been running seriously-ish for a bit over a year, building up to the MK Marathon next May, so I've been running a few races here and there, focusing a little bit on Half Marathons, to get my legs used to longer races, and to get a feel for pacing.

This started with the Buckingham Marathon in May - which was the first really hot day of the early summer, so I suffered in the heat badly from about mile 5, but still got a massive PB * (gong alert) of 1:38:11; and the Burnham Beeches Half in August - three days after my friend Cap'n Dan ruined me with a 100m sprint track session, but still PBed (moar gong!) with 1:37:36. But I definitely felt that there was a bit more in me in the right conditions (plus I'd maybe get a bit faster through training anyway)...

So when the email came round at work, asking if anyone wanted a place in the Royal Parks Half Marathon, I jumped at the chance.

The Royal Parks Half Marathon is run around central London, through all the major parks, on closed roads - I KNOW! But it's massive - with 16,000 runners! It's a balloted race, and hugely over-subscribed, but we were entering a 10 man corporate team - so although I needed to raise some money I was guaranteed a place.

 To be really honest, the scale of the race scared me a bit - I'm more used to local events with hundreds, or maybe even a thousand runners, where you can get a cup of tea from an urn afterwards, and a bit of homemade ginger parkin - I've lived in towns with fewer than 16,000 inhabitants - this was a whole other level!

With perfect timing, there were no trains on Sunday morning due to engineering works - aargh!, but my amazing friend Jen (MK Marathon Ambassador 2018 - http://jendish.blogspot.com/ ) was also running for an addiction charity and so her lovely mum gave me a lift - thank you!

 My original plan was to get to Hyde Park in plenty of time, have an espresso, use one of the delightful Portaloos (bokes) and text everyone else to say I was there, then meet up for a group photo; but with 30,000 odd people in the park the mobile networks were down; so after milling about in the pouring rain for a bit aimlessly, it seemed sensible to give up on finding anyone at all, and instead to dump my bag and get lined up at the start.

Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, so the queue for the bag drop took 20 minutes, which only left 10 minutes for a last panicky wee and a jog to the start.

I'd given an expected finish time of 1:40:00 and so had a green funnel number (the first really big start group - behind the slebs etc.) , so had expected to be somewhere near the front -HA! there were so many people in the green start that I could only just see the 1:50 pacers hundreds of places ahead of me.

The gun went at 10:00 on the dot, but there was such a crowd that I didn't pass over the timing mat for nearly 6 minutes - hit start on my watch, took a deep breath and went...

I'd got a proper race plan in my head - take the first 3 miles "relatively" easy at about 7:25 pace, not get carried away, then wind it up to about 7:10ish for the next 9, then empty the tank for the last mile - hopefully, fingers crossed, with a fair wind etc. just dipping under 1:35.

1:35 may seem like a completely arbitrary time - but if you are a stats nerd like me - then you'd know that 1:35 is the outside cut-off time for a RunBritain Ranking for Half Marathon for a Male V45; the Royal Parks Half isn't a RunBritain ranked event - unlike the MK Marathon, but it would prove to myself that I was capable of that time (my RunBritain page is here https://www.runbritainrankings.com/runners/profile.aspx?athleteid=910530 - although I suspect it uses the phrase "athlete" sarcastically in my case).

However, you just couldn't run with any flow - there were so many people ahead of me, so it was more a case of jog, sprint, jog, sprint, stand still, sprint - so although my pace was still on target I was burning energy much faster than was sustainable... So sensibly, the plan should have changed to "don't worry about the pace, enjoy the views and the atmosphere, just soak it up" - but my friend Dom was also racing, and he's got a 5k PB A MINUTE FASTER THAN ME! - so I was willing to cough up a lung to try and catch him.

Although the crowds were thinning, and I'd already been going MUCH too fast - 7:14, 7:05, 7:02, 7:02 for the first 4 miles - at the start of mile 5 the roads were clear enough to run a little more smoothly - which would have been the perfect opportunity to run a steady mile, and plan the rest of the race - you may notice that I used the phrase "would have been" as instead I gunned it and ran a 6:47 mile for mile 5 which was really, really stupid - as the average pace of my previous Half Marathon PB had been at 7:25 mile pace.

But I felt okay, and thought at this point, even if I slowed spectacularly, then I'd still have a respectable time, so backed off a bit and just gritted my teeth (the next 7 miles were at an average of 7:11).

I was wearing a vest and arm-warmers, because I like the old-school vibe and don't mind looking stupid, but have an ace new tip - you can tuck energy gels in the top of your arm-warmers, and you don't need to carry them (I don't have a pocket in my shorts as they are VERY short-shorts! Old-school vibe again) - and the couple of gels up my sleeve (literally! Ho ho!) were just about enough to keep my going - there were loads of water stations, and it was raining - hooray! I LOVE running in the rain!

The crowds were amazing - cheering us on by name, with drummers, bands, gongs, high-fiving, cowbells etc. Which at about mile 12 was a huuuge help as I was really starting to struggle by then. Also, I wasn't sure quite how fast I was going as because I was having to weave about to overtake groups of people, my watch was registering the (legitimately run) extra distance which was skewing my mile average pace. So I would have to wait until my watch went "ping" at a particular mile point, take a mental note of my cumulative time, then check my watch as I went through the real mile marker - subtract one time from the other, divide by the miles run and add the seconds to my average - easy at mile 3, less so when exhausted at mile 12 - so I was losing track of where I was.

As we hit the final mile the crowds got thicker and they had marked 800 meters to go, 400 meters to go etc. but by now I was running on fumes, and my original plan to run a really fast last mile went out of the window. As we got within a couple of hundred metres of the finish I could see the clock, and that it was fast approaching 1:40:00 - I didn't know what the clock had said when I went under it at the start, so instead decided to try to beat the magic 1:40:00, dipping under the clock with seconds to spare.

There was no way to check my real time, so I had to wait until my phone finally worked, then ring my wife at home, who had been tracking me, and she said...

1:34:16!!

More than 4 minutes off my previous PB - AND we got a goody bag with snacks, tea-bags, a shopping bag and a bottle of brown sauce?!?!?

Looking back, if it had been a smaller race without the crowds, then realistically I could have been a couple of minutes quicker... So sub 90 minutes is getting increasingly possible (although I'm getting increasingly older) bring on the Dirt Half in November!






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