Remember, remember the 17th November

I really can't believe that it is already November and I have now completed eleven half marathons during the year. It seems a very long time ago since I was in Tromso and Spitzbergen in January.

For this race, a couple of my friends from the Portishead Running Club (PRC), Simon and Jon decided that they wanted to run as well, so the three of us left home at 8am for the 90 minute drive up to the Shakespeare Raceway near Stratford on Avon. The raceway is an old airfield constructed during the second world war and now used partly as a drag racing strip and also for gliding.

The organisation throughout was excellent, but I was really impressed when the race director personally took us to the finish so that we understood the last part of our route.

There are actually three races taking place at the same time, with a 5km, 10km and half marathon all starting at 11am. There were probably around 1000 starters, but it was impossible to assess who was running which distance (except for their number which is only on the front of their vests). Many runners hared off at top speed so I just started at the pace I decided before the race - between 4.10 and 4.15 per km. I decided to go with metric pace rather than imperial as I had found this quite effective in Cologne last month. Each lap was 5km going up and down each of the three tarmac runways and along the drag strip. One thing I did not like was the number of time we had to run around sharp corners (generally cones).

I quickly grouped with several other runners and we stayed together pretty much until the end of the race. I was pretty amazed when I managed to lap a couple of runners on my second lap around the course and by the third lap I was overtaking plenty of the 10km runners on their second lap. On my final lap, I started to lap some of the half marathon runners and also overtook one of the PRC older runners Richard as I was on the last part of my fourth lap.

At the 20km mark, the runners made a short 1100m there and back run to complete the half marathon. My completion time by my watch was 1h29m17s. Two seconds faster than Bristol but two seconds slower than Cologne.

I will have to analyse my lap times and see if it is possible to get a sub 1.29 time at the AVR half marathon in three weeks.

The website did give the following information for my 5km splits (as there was a mat we crossed each time).

5km - 21.05 @ 4.13/km
10km - 21.16 (42.21) @4.15/km
15km - 21.17 (63.38) @4.15/km
20km - 21.18 (84.56) @4.15/km
Finish - 4.20 (89.15) @3.57/km

All in all a fantastic day and my average time for each race has finally dropped below 1h33m per race.