2014 Sydney Half Marathon - race report.
Sometimes there's no explanation for a surprising performance other than "the training must have paid off".
By rights this should have been a modest race for me. Coming off the back of a string of night shifts I was in full nocturnal mode and completely unable to sleep at all the night before the race. Not ideal. My sleeplessness at least did allow me to have a decent breakfast around three hours before race start time, and I think that may have helped counteract the lack of sleep to a certain extent. At the end of the day however I can only think my consistent training over the last few weeks, including weekly twenty kilometre long runs paid off, for it was a good day out.
Race day began at 05:25 outside my brother-in-law's house. He was also racing today and I cadged a lift in to the city with him, mainly so as to catch up in general, for even though he lives just a few minutes down the road from me, we rarely have time just to natter about running or anything in general, so this was a good opportunity.
We parked in the cavernous Domain parking centre, a short walk from the race, and an ideal place to warm up, as being underground it was considerably warmer than up in the park. Not that it was a cold day, but the extra few degrees were welcome. We warmed up with about three laps of the car park interior, which equated to about a kilometre, and it loosened the legs nicely, got the heart pumping and actually made me feel pretty human again, despite the lack of sleep. It was probably the most positive outcome I've had yet from a pre-race warm up.
We then joined scores of other runners on the somewhat ironic travelator that ferried us a few hundred metres to Hyde Park, where the race starts and finishes. Arriving at the start about a half hour early, we found the carnival atmosphere in full swing and the race master of ceremonies already losing his voice as he cajoled us over the public address system to "use the facilities", drop our gear off at the baggage area and ensure we began the race from the correct starting pen.
My brother-in-law is a much faster runner than me (he finished in 1h38m) and we were therefore in different starting groups, so we bade farewell and made our way to our respective areas.
After the inevitable delays that seem to afflict this event we finally heard our starting gun and I, with 12,000 other runners trudged over the starting line about twenty minutes later than scheduled, and we were on our way.
My only thought as to race plans was to run at a comfortable pace and see what happened. I had no desire to run a fast race, but it had to be said that conditions were ideal. Whilst it's not a fast course, being twisty, quite crowded and with a few hills here and there, the conditions seemed to dictate that we would set a decent tempo.
So it was that I found myself running the first kilometres at around fifty to sixty seconds per kilometre faster than training pace, and it felt very comfortable. Whilst I was breathing quite normally and feeling totally fine with it, quite a few around me were struggling with this tempo, so I figured I was doing quite well and just pushed on at the same pace.
The race winds its way around the city streets, taking in some famous landmarks, although not crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This is a serious race with many of the runners being professionals and top amateur and club runners, all of whom were of course far, far ahead of where I was. It was about the seven kilometre mark when we first saw the leaders who ran past on the first out-and-back section, and they were flying. The eventual winner finished in 63 minutes, not a record for this event, but given the nature of the course quite an astonishing time.
I reached the half way point in 58:20, still feeling very good, and whilst this was way faster than I had expected or intended, I kept going, and as it became a little tougher, still felt strong enough to push on and maintain that pace or very near to it. The only real problem was the crowd of runners - it became quite a nuisance at times, particularly on the hills trying to get through the mob, especially (and unusually) in the second half of the race where the road was more often in "out and back" mode and so we only had half the road to run on.
Despite this I still ran a solid second half in 59:01, only a little slower than the first half, to finish in 1h57:22, very surprisingly well inside the two hours that I thought wouldn't happen this time, and overall my third-fastest ever half marathon.
I can only put it down to fairly disciplined training, and have to think that given better circumstances (i.e. actually getting some sleep) and perhaps a little more speed work, a PB would have been a distinct possibility.
So, a good race for me, and a good platform to now launch my marathon training, the next one being the Sydney Marathon in September, and so plenty of time to work a potential marathon PB into my training legs.
On we go.
May as well ... 2014
