Peter Smith: Blog

My goal was to break 1:35:00, and whilst this is a new per­sonal record, I didn’t achieve that goal. But don’t get me wrong, it was fun.

So, why do I think I missed my tar­get. It would be easy (but wrong) to blame my per­form­ance on the fact that the organ­isers prom­ised a cof­fee cart at the start, but it turned up too late … us run­ners were being cor­ralled before they got into production.

The real reason is a little more com­plic­ated. I tend to run and to judge/balance my effort from the pace feed­back I get from Run­Meter. This iPhone app tracks my pro­gress using GPS and provides me with real-time updates on my pace. For this race, I wanted to ease gently into my ‘mara­thon pace’, which I wanted to be 4:30.

Alas, I failed to cor­rectly set-up Run­Meter, so the feed­back it gave was both not very help­ful, and it ended pre­ma­turely. So, I did most of the run with updates only every 1Km. As a res­ult, I found I was run­ning far to fast (sub 4:00 pace) for a large por­tion of the middle of the race. Con­sequently, I ran out of puff in the later stages.

Although the race is described as gen­er­ally down hill, the first third of the race is a series of long, mainly gentle, up hills. The rest is undu­lat­ing downhills–some quite steep. The mas­sage ther­ap­ist could tell that my quads had worked harder than my hams …

The spec­tat­ors were great; they offered a lot of encour­age­ment, and many poin­ted out that “It’s all down­hill from here”. That might have been true, in gen­eral, but the undu­lat­ing nature of the course meant that there was also going to be some kind of uphill after each of the downhills.

There were some com­pet­it­ors in wheel­chairs. One, was dressed as a gor­illa and could really motor down­hill (and he wasn’t too shabby going up hill either). What an inspir­a­tion, espe­cially given the heat. (Oh, and yes, he did beat me.)

As I men­tioned, I was doing this race (amongst other reas­ons) to raise money for EB. So, Lisa Calla­gher was also their, and she did a great job in the half-marathon walk. Actu­ally, it was a great time for her first walk­ing race. I man­aged to raise about $1,200 for EB. Now to col­lect that money …