Sorry... not posted my post race report for the Bath half-marathon on the 15th October...
Just back from a nice easy local 10km trail run in the mud - kept it really easy (6:15 min per km) but enjoyed being out. My training post the Bath half has been pretty light, to say the least, although not been such great weather.
Anyway, onto the race report...
As I have peviously highlighted I went into the race with my Achilles (left foot) and Plantar fasciitis (right foot) niggles but fortunately they didn't give me too much trouble.
It took a good 2-3 hours to get to the start line, a long drive, although with no hold ups, and then some fun and games getting parked and into the City centre with the thousands of other runners who like us had opted for 'Park and Ride'. I was quite surprised at the size of the field, apparently some 15,000 runners!
We found Amalie, grabbed a coffee and headed for the start line. Just to note when I first got up at 6ish I made sure I had a good helping of porridge. We were in Bath by 10am and supposed to be off at 10:40am, a nice respectable time.
It felt good to be on a crowded start line once again (been a while) - Amalie (her first ever running race) was so excited and that was lovely to see. I wanted her to have a good race. Initially she wanted me to run with her, and set a steady pace to get her over the line within 2 hours. Then the goal changed to sub 1:50 and then on race day we agreed on a slightly more ambitious 1:45 - now this was going to hurt a bit!
With previous PB's (1:35 ish - a good number of years ago!) I thought a sub 1:45 was possible but we were going to have to push it. The race gun started and we were off. There were a lot of people and it took 2km to settle down, at that time we were already averaging more than 5 mins per km so our pace needed to increase to achieve our target. Over the next 10km we ran consistent 4:40 to 4:45 mins per km.
I thought Amalie would tire but she was loving it - she rows for Bath University and her fitness / strength is good (better than mine). Anyway, helped by all the crowd support we kept on pushing the pace right through the second lap and then to the finish.
About 0.5km from the finish (a short climb) we saw Lucy and Oliver who gave Amalie and I the final support we needed to push for the finish line. Amalie was on a high and you could see she wanted to sprint the final distance - I let her go and have her glory - she deserved it. She got around 1:43 on the clock and came around 20th in her age group. I followed her in 30 secs later to come around 50th in my age group - good enough for me!
A great day of racing - an amazing first race by Amalie (she is hooked now!) and a very respectable time for me.
Next one... I have booked the Brighton half-marathon but this time will be running with my Son, Alex.
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