Fleetwood Half Marathon

On Sunday August 25th I took a jaunt down to Lancashire to join over 500 other competitors who were taking part in the Fleetwood Half Marathon.

Part, but not all of my strategy this year has been to enter a few races I hadn’t previously done to keep the motivation up. This seems to be working for me as 2013 has not only saw me enjoying my running more than ever, but the knock on effect has also saw me running lifetime bests over various distances. That’s a bonus I wouldn’t have seen coming 12 months ago as 2012 was blighted by injuries.

To Sundays Half Marathon. I travelled down on Saturday night ( having toyed with a 5 am drive down on the Sunday ), and as such I arrived at the course fairly fresh. An issue and minor concern was that I hadn’t raced for 5 weeks, a decision I took a few weeks ago in order to focus purely on training for a spell, so with 5 weeks still to go before my Marathon I figured this would be a good test and benchmark to see where I was.

The race started and saw the eventual winner shoot off like a hare (he won by 4 minutes) and behind him a group of 3 working together. The next group saw myself in a pack of 6, which was great for me as it was pretty windy and we all took turns at the front to give each other a break. Wind behind for a lot of the first half of the race, I was 34.58 for the first 10k and by the time the pack I was in had been cut to 4 runners we hit 10 miles in just under 58 minutes which was borderline pb pace for me and a bit of a surprise.

The last 5K saw the wind in our faces however and any pb chance went belly up, but at the finish line I was more than happy to finish in 8th place and 1st Vet in a time of 1.16.53, but more importantly seemingly injury free !

To put things into perspective, prior to this year my HM pb was 77.34 and in 2013 I have ran 3 below 77 minutes, with one below 76 minutes so a few subtle changes I have made to things are definitely working for me. I’m also happy with my fitness just now – although I’m old and wise enough to know by now that anything can happen in a Marathon so what will be, will be in Warsaw. I  certainly won’t be putting any added pressure on myself with any predictions.

The day was topped off by meeting up with a lifetime friend who abides down there now, a good lunch, and a pleasant drive up the M6 back home.

Scott (26/8/13)