In a few words, I'm very disappointed. I thought that the last 6 or so weeks of consistent marathon training and higher mileage raised my fitness across the board, and I should be able to have a good race. But it was not to be. I didn't take any days off this week, because I wanted to keep consistent mileage. Maybe it was a mistake and I should have taken Friday off. Most runs were easy, but I didn't really feel fresh and didn't have a spring in my step. Maybe I haven't fully recovered from my 8x800m workout. On top of that, yesterday, after I ran easy 4 miles, we decided to go explore south London and promptly got lost. We then ended up walking a good 2 hours through not so nice parts of London until we got to some civilization again. My feet were pretty tired, but I have no idea if it played any role today. It's most likely an excuse I'm trying to use to explain my lousy performance today.
So, here is how it played out today. I got to the race, ran my warmup and noticed I was pretty slow, around 9:30 pace on the warmup. Then, I felt better doing strides. The race was extremely low key, no race clock even! They started 18 minutes later than announced, so I kept jogging and doing light strides to keep warm (it wasn't too cold, but pretty windy, and I wished I wore gloves). After some standing around on the start line, they finally let us go. The first kilometer was up a slight incline and into some wind, but I was still unhappy to see Garmin showing around 7:25-7:29 pace. It didn't feel easy, so I wasn't pushing it any more. At 1 km mark I hit the lap button and got 4:23. Here comes another twist with this race - all the markers were off. So, the accurate split is this:
1km - 0.58mi - 4:23 (7:30 pace).
After that, it's gotten totally flat or even a bit downhill sometimes, and I seemed to have settled into a nice rhythm. Garmin read 7:11-7:15 on this stretch. I thought this is a true pace I should be able to sustain with all the training I'm doing now. So I went for it. No further markers till 4km.
4km - 1.80mi - 13:01 (7:14 pace).
At this point it became painfully (literally) clear that maintaining 7:15 pace was wishful thinking. I went anaerobic and had to slow down a lot, feeling pretty disgusted with myself. Also, running at a slight incline now which is not helping. The next marker was 5km, again it was short:
5km - 0.51mi - 3:51 (7:33 pace).
The next 2 km's or so, I was just suffering in survival mode. Next marker was 7km, this time it was too long.
7km - 1.36mi - 10:12 (7:31 pace).
At this point, I guess I recovered somewhat, and figuring it was the last km, I started pushing the pace again. There was also some slight downhill which helped. But this km was very long, it was in fact almost a mile!! I don't know how they measured the course (but it's not a certified course, so can't really complain). I finally saw the finish line about 200m away and put some kick in - I actually had something left in the tank, after all this!
8km - 0.93mi - 6:38 (7:11 pace).
Looked at the Garmin time (remember, no race clock!) - it read 38:07. I thought, no way I ran THIS slow. Flipped the mode to history, and sure enough, the course was 5.18mi. long. So, it means 7:22 average pace. This is bad, even worse than equivalent performance based on my 5K in November. I should have been able to at least maintain 7:19 pace, but I slipped below even that. I'm wondering, where is the fitness with all the hard work I'm putting in?? Why is my LT so low? I thought I was doing well, and training was going fine, and here is this dismal result. I heard that people don't generally run well shorter distances while marathon training, but I expected better. I hoped my fitness would be up a notch from November. This result doesn't give me much confidence for a half marathon in 2 weeks :(.
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