Race Report: Wimbledon Half Marathon 2015

I've noticed a race around Wimbledon Common a few times, and today I was in it. It's the Wimbledon Half Marathon, put on by Run Through events. And it was wet. Very wet. The rain started soon after we arrived, and gradually got harder.

The first wave went off at 9:30, for those aiming for sub-1:40. Second wave three minutes later for sub-1:50, third after another three minutes for those aiming for the significant 2-hour mark, and then finally fourth wave with everyone else.

I was aiming to beat my Hitchin Hard Half time of 2:00:07 so I placed myself in the sub-2 wave. Mrs was also aiming to beat her time and go sub 2:15, so she went in the fourth wave.

The Wimbledon Half route

The first couple of km are mainly uphill, climbing from the recreation ground up towards the Wimbledon parkrun route and the Windmill tea rooms. I took a nice easy start, 6:00 for the first km, 5:50 for the second. Once up on the flat middle section though I felt good, so pushed a little harder. I was aiming for an average of under 5:40 per km, so was quite pleased when I knocked the next few off at around 5:20.

What goes up must come down, so it was a nice long fast downhill back to the river to complete lap 1. I felt really good, and was running at a good even pace. I'd been steadily overtaking people all the way round, and was enjoying picking off who would be next.

Good pacing (green line) and a few sharp ups and downs!

The uphill section was a bit tougher this time, but I engaged my glutes and kept upright, with high cadence - that seemed to work well. The rain was absolutely torrential, despite being in a forest for most of the route we were all completely drenched to the skin!

Into the final third of the race distance and I was having to work harder to keep the pace up. I was confident I would break 2:00 and it looked like I'd even get under 1:55. Finishing the lap there's a little nasty hill that nearly killed me, but then back onto the grass of the playing field for a finishing stretch and a bit of a sprint to the line.

The best thing? The medal has a Womble on it :)

The official results are out already, and with them the proof that I'd smashed my target of 2:00, coming in at 1:52:27 for 180th position overall. Mrs also did absolutely amazingly, finishing in 2:06:44 for 300th place overall. We're both super-happy with that, on a muddy, soaking wet, 100% off-road course (with some hills for fun).

The only other thing I wanted to do was negative split (do the second half faster than the first). Despite logging my runs into about a half dozen different activity/performance tracking sites, I can't see an easy way to find that out (you'd think "What was the time when I got to 10.55km?" would be easy enough to work out!).

Doing it rough and ready, my 10-11km split was 5:48, so if I add 0.55 of that to my 10km time, that's 53:51 + (0.55 x 5:48) = 0:57:02 for 10.5km. Take that from my overall time of 1:52:27 to get the second half, and that comes to 0:55:25 - so I negative split by 1:37! I'm very happy with that!!

LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) breakfast of champions!

Dinner time now - and a richly deserved curry at Khanage - the best curry house in Wimbledon.

Holiday! Race report: Malmesbury half marathon

Wait, what? "Holiday" and "Race report"? Well it's like this...

A long-ish slow-ish run was on the cards for today, but we don't know the area. So last night I looked around on t'Internet for some trail run routes. I stumbled across the Frome Running Club site (they've been running since 1981, apparently - I'm assuming not continuously). On their site I'm pretty sure there was a link to the Malmesbury Half Marathon page - though oddly I can't find it now. Local half, £20 quid on the day, a bit hilly and pretty countryside. Perfect. It was decided. So we drank two bottles of wine, I bought an iPhone (drunken purchase and a half), and turned in for the night.

I think we arrived first - for a local race the facilities were surprisingly good

Up at 6.30am (on a Sunday? We are on holiday, right? Yes? OK just checking) and off to Malmesbury. Uneventful drive apart from the bit where I drove down a road too narrow for the car and had to reverse back up a steep hill with pointy walls on each side, trying to keep it together while Mrs did a saintly job of directing me. Learned that my car far prefers going forwards, and also that burning clutch is quite an unpleasant smell.

Pretty sure I could have got through this, actually (maybe...)

This is significantly steeper, narrower, and harder to get up in reverse than it looks here

I was going to try the run fasted (like yesterday) but the bacon smell from the refreshments booth was far too hard to resist. One bacon roll each, and a pretty good cup of filter coffee.

The start was up in the town, so after a brief race briefing we were led up en masse. The Mayor of somewhere started the fun, and with a "Go!" we were off.

Mrs and I had vaguely discussed a race plan. Firstly: It's not a pedal-to-the-metal race, it's a training run. We're not out to kill ourselves, so take it easy. Secondly: A negative split would be nice (covering the second half of the race in less time than the first half). Finally: Try and keep at around 6min/km, maybe a little below.

As we set off the tide of other runners all ran away from us. This is normal, everyone starts too fast - it's hard not to get carried away. We were a little too conservative on the second km and picked it up a little bit. We passed the 10km timer at 59:29 - under an hour is fine. Good pace. It's unfortunate the "mid-point" timing mat was on the 10km line, the 10.55km point would have been better (a half marathon being 13.1 miles, or 21.1km).

I definitely ramped it up in the second half

We'd already regained some places - the middle of the race is when most people of similar ability are at an equal pace, though the ones who really went out hard are starting to slow already. At about 8 miles she got a move on and started pulling away - can't let that happen! From there on we just got faster and faster. As everyone was slowing down, we were getting faster. I pulled her back and ran with her again - we felt good! Strong! This is fun!

Mrs pulled away again with a couple of km left, I worked hard to hang on - she was flying! I finally caught her again as we got back into Malmesbury. I had a good rhythm so pushed on past, opening up a small lead to the finish.

I finished in in 02:02:44 for 174th place (of 248 starters and 243 finishers), 126th man (of 153) and 48th in my age group (an unusually wide group, M 20-39). The results put me in 202nd place at the 10km mark, so I ran up 28 places in the final 11.1km - no the results don't set the world on fire, and it's a long way from my 1:40:30 PB - but for a spontaneous post-injury training run, I'm happy with that!

Pace over each 5km stretch was:

• Start to 5km - 29:25
• 5km to 10km - 30:10
• 10km to 15km - 29:50
• 15km to 20km - 28:28
• 20km to Finish - 24:19 (scaled to give 5km pace)

This gives a great negative split of 3:36 (using my Garmin data to making some estimates about where the middle is):

• First half: 63:10
• Second half: 59:34

A handshake from the Mayor, an unexpected finishers' medal, some sneaky cake and a glorious cup of tea, and we were done. Very happy indeed with that spontaneous little outing.

Unexpected bling!

Malmesbury was lovely. Friendly people, pretty village, and a beautiful half marathon route. It's the second year the race has been held (was 6C and a thunderstorm last year apparently!) and I'm sure it'll become a regular fixture on the local athletics calendar.