Orange Silver April

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Thanks Sweder, Dan, I appreciate your confidence, really I do. In fact, I respect your wisdom to such an extent that today I did indeed do something rather extraordinary, helped also by something EG wrote some time back about how we can actually achieve things we thought not possible and reach goals we thought only others would ever reach if only we would be a little bolder.

Neatly dove-tailing with those sentiments was the stark reality revealed by the to-my-mind most useful of the online race time predictors at McMillan Running which said that to beat my half mara PB I need to be running 10km in around 51 minutes. Now as it happens, my oldest PB is the 10km, which I ran in 50:07 way back in 2004. And those seven seconds have always bugged me. So I figured I had to give this a shot, and with your words of confidence and encouragement ringing in my ears, I set forth to give the PB a crack.

The treadmill seemed by far the best option for this attempt, given the lack of flat anywhere to run around my village. It also meant I could control the pace to the nth degree, which is invaluable.

After a 2km warm-up jog, I set the speed to a little under 5 min/km pace and headed off to the sounds of my latest 'PB playlist'. Immediately it all felt pretty good and by 2km in I was a little under my target and travelling well. I very gradually increased my speed and hit 5km in 24:45, well inside my PB time but having to maintain that pace.

From then on, hard though it was, I kept increasing the speed very slightly to give myself a little leeway should things go pear-shaped at the end. I needn't have worried. Whilst I wouldn't call the run 'easy' - it certainly was a tough run - it was very manageable, and I reached 10km in a peachy 48:57, a PB by 1:10. Given this PB has stood for over nine years and I'm now in my 50s, I was well pleased with this effort. It's never easy training at race pace on a treadmill, let alone PB pace, so I'm stoked with this time and look forward to what I may be able to accomplish under race conditions.

So thanks, everyone ... you've inspired me yet again to improve my best, and I'm feeling very confident now of a good run at the half marathon in a little over three weeks.

YTD: 568.1km