It's over for 2012

Well, that's it. All of my twelve half marathons for 2012 are over and despite some setbacks during the year, I have completed one in every month without any serious injury and with a fitness level I never would have dreamed of at the beginning of the year.

Todays race was the inaugural AVR Wiltshire half marathon staged near Trowbridge in the UK. As it was my last race of the year, I was aiming to try to beat my PB from Cologne and so set off with a pace of 6.45 in mind.

My actual mile splits were:

6.41 6.52 6.47 6.46 6.43 6.45 7.00 6.44 7.18 6.52 6.55 6.52 6.41

You can probably see from the middle section that there were two nasty hills (see the route profile).

Up until the 10km marker I still felt as if I was on for a sub 1.29 PB but the two hills just knackered me and pulled me back further than it was possible to come back from.

It was also pretty windy with a wind speed of 17mph according to met office with 27mph gusts. That wasn't too bad in the early miles when I was running in a group and managing to draft others. However, when I went off by myself after about 4 miles it became much harder. One guy from Salisbury that I overtook at 5 miles then managed to catch me up on the second hill and although I tried to stay with him, he just had far too much energy and finished 40 seconds in front of me.

Overall, it was a great race and it made a good end to the weekend. On Saturday, I was coaching with the SW Junior orienteering squad as we had our Christmas weekend training on Salisbury Plain (although I wasn't doing much running!).

Anyway, I finished in 1h 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Not quite what I wanted, but if I'm honest, a pretty good finish to my challenge year. Even better, I finished the first 10km in 41m59s (a chip time - not estimated) which is the second fastest time I have ever raced.

Roll on my two Christmas races and I better decide what I'm going to do for 2013!