Tuesday 23 April 2013

Pacing Wexford Half Marathon

Thursday, 18th April - 21.6km Easy Run with 6 x 1mile @ 10km pace
My endurance fitness is pretty good at this moment in time and should tick along nicely as during May I have two marathons to pace (4:30 in Limerick & 4:15 in Kildare) and one to run freely (Killarney, but not a goal race!) so that should continue to take care of itself.

As part of this new training cycle my main area of focus therefore will be to work on my shorter distance speed. I have a VO2Max session built into my plans for most weeks as well as the IMRA Leinster League starting this Wednesday.

One further impetus will be the McMillan 10km Plan. This is aimed at training you to run to your best potential 10km in 8 weeks time, which coincides with my goal marathon. I'll do the training workouts in order to get faster, but the goal 10km race will probably not happen at the correct time. No worries though, as all I really want is the training benefits.

So, with this in mind I did the first of these sessions this evening. The weather was pretty foul with showers and a stiff wind so I wasn’t expecting much. According to the McMillan calculator a 3:10 marathon equates to a 40:30 10km (current PB is 42:22 from last month) so I took my target pace from this (4:02/km). The first couple of mile splits were ok coming in at 4:05 & 4:07. McMillan says not to worry if you struggle to hit pace on this first session, that it will all come together over the course of the 8 week plan. The third mile involved a downhill into the wind, followed by an uphill into the wind and was tougher coming in at 4:10/km. At the end of this split I was feeling pretty knackered (not helped by last nights MP run) and thoughts were going through my head of calling it a day. Instead I took an extra long recovery jog to remove another section of uphill from the equation and soon I had looped back to the starting point of Mile 2 where I repeated it to tick off my 4th mile in 4:05/km pace – 2 seconds faster than mile 2. This time my form actually felt better so I think I must have been running more economically.
Mile 5 was a repeat of mile 3 but this time my pace slowed by 4 seconds to complete it in 4:14/km which surprised me as I felt I was still giving it top effort. My final fast mile of the session was thrown in 2 miles later (I’d planned to get to level ground again and this was the most suitable location). Once again I felt I was giving it full effort but the pace this time was 4:13/km. I’m guessing the legs were just tired and the input just couldn’t quite get the required response from the legs for the desired output. 

Nevertheless, this was a really good session so I hope to see the paces drop over the course of 8 weeks, because if I don’t then there’s hardly like to be a 3:10 in the end!


Friday, 19th April - 11.6km Recovery Run 
I took it easy today and just went for a recovery run after a couple of tougher days. Legs were happy to have the relaxed pace. Nothing much else to report from this one.

Saturday, 20th April – 5.0km Malahide Parkrun with 2.3km w/u and 0.5km c/d
Nice easy warm-up with a run to the start from the furthest car park before remembering halfway there that I’d forgotten my barcode. This helped extend the warm up to over 2km. 


Wasn’t quite sure what kind of time to expect from this run as the legs were still feeling Wed and Thurs and possibly even Sunday’s runs so I figured I’d just run it as a fast session and take whatever time that resulted in. After a moments silence for Boston we were soon away. First couple of kms I was passing a few people and generally feeling good @ 4:00/km pace or thereabouts. I managed to keep this going for the third km also but started finding the pace a little tough when we passed over the grassy area on the fourth km. I think my GPS was affected by the trees around here also as my av pace went way out to 4:30/km for that km even though I was keeping reasonable pace with all others around me. I did get passed here by a few runners though so 4:15-4:20 may have been about right. Then, in the final km I managed to get a bit of pace back again to finish off with a 4:13 km. All totalled it gave a 20:31 which happens to be 1 second quicker than my official PB from Patrick’s Day run in Dublin last year. Hopefully with my McMillan 10km sessions I should be able to hold 4:00/km pace a little longer and snip those 31 seconds off within a few weeks! Happy enough overall.

Afterwards I bumped into a mate (
Dave) from my footie days and his friend (Ximi) so we all went off for a coffee/water in Avoca for my first time there. Really nice spot so an enjoyable hour or so sitting out in the brilliant sunshine followed. I think Parkrun have just nabbed their 2 most recent converts! We rounded out the morning with a gentle 500m jog back to our cars. Later in the evening I went out for another 5.2km run to bulk up the day’s requirement. Nice and easy and served as a decent recovery from the race earlier. 


Sunday, 21 April 2013 - 21.2km Wexford Half Marathon 
Travelling down to Wexford it was a horrendous morning of rain but it had been promised in the weather reports to clear up just as the race was due to start. I was pacing the 1:45 gang and up at registration I ran into Karen and Eamon who were both pacing the 2:00 gang. We jogged down to the start area and it wan’t long before we had lots of people asking what times we were pacing so I knew there’d be a good few with us. 

My pacing partner was David Mahony who had ran in Boston last week so I’m sure the moment’s silence at the beginning would have hit home even harder with him as the rest of us. Shortly afterwards we were away. 100m later and we were rounding a 180 degree u-turn which I found a little odd. The first 6-7km were mainly uphill. Nothing too steep but a long drag most of the way. We had intentionally kept the pace slightly easier for this section so that the group would have some chance once we crested the high point of the course. This coincided with our turn into the Johnstown Castle grounds where we whittled away another few kms. Although it was nice scenery within the grounds there were a few narrow paths for our 30-strong crowd to negotiate and also some tighter corners where it would have been easy to have people trip over each other. 

We were soon back out on the country lanes and running through the tiny village of Piercestown before coming out onto the main road at around the 15km mark. Here the traffic was much busier and this was probably the least appealing part of the route. Myself and Dave had managed to build up a 90 second buffer by this stage and so I let them run on with about 1km to go so I could try and round up a few more people to get over the line. There were four runners that had fallen off the back of our group that I targeted and they all managed to make the sub 1:45 easily in the end so that was a pretty good result.

Overall a pretty decent race and afterwards I ran into a few more boardsies and friends where there was a good bit of craic and banter. A nice easy run for the day too and thankfully no problems with blisters this week!!


Week 16 Summary:
RTW: 5 from 7 days
DTW: 76.8km
DTY: 1321.4km

No comments:

Post a Comment