Last post I fibbed just a little – by omission. I neglected to state my goal for running this year:
In 2010 I will run a Half Marathon in 2 hours or less.
Gulp.
My PB for that race is 2:12:24.
In 2003 I did the Queen City Half Marathon in 2:20:21; and in 2005 in 2:16:16
Don says I can do it, and I don’t think he’s just saying that because it’s His Duty As A Good Boyfriend to say things like that. He says it based on my performance at the Run Through Time on New Year’s Eve – a 5 K “fun run” at UVic.
I ran it in 28:04, which I think was a PB for me but I can only find results online for one other 5K I’ve done – the rest I did before the days if the interwebs and timing chips.
Apparently I ran the 34th Annual YMCA Regina Buffalothon 5K in 2005 in 29:17. I don’t remember running it at all, probably because I was training for the Half Marathon that year, or perhaps because I was crazy in love: earlier that month I had visited Victoria and decided I wanted to move here.
In any event, I decided on Dec 31 not to treat the race as a “fun run” but as a test/training run. I wanted to see how well I would do giving it some effort. Don did run it just for fun, having done his real workout earlier that day, so he stayed behind in he pack to run it with me.
I did better than I thought. I went out with my Garmin at the ready, but after a couple of kilometres I stopped looking at it and asked Don to keep us at a 5:45 per kilometre pace. I started out back of the pack and slow – about a 6:15 pace to start. I like to pass people at the beginning and I like to do negative splits (first half slower than the second, finishing strong).
The race is two laps around a circular drive at the University of Victoria. At the second lap I started to pick up speed and there it was again: the focus, the tunnel vision I get when I’m working hard and I’ve got the finish line in sight. I passed a whole lotta people. That’s when I asked Don to keep us on my goal pace.
About 1 K before the finish I made the mistake of asking him what pace we were on. I was working hard.
“I shouldn’t tell you,” he said.
“Tell me!” I gasped.
“4:31.” he said.
“Holy crap!” I said, still gasping.
“It’s OK – you’re doing fine. Breathe deeply. Don’t slow down your breathing, just fill up your lungs, use your diaphragm.”
I did back off that pace for the last couple of hundred metres. Don explained that I was probably running at my lactate threshold pace – a pace close to which most serious runners run every race.
“Even marathons?” I said.
“Yes, I’m running that way every marathon,” (he’s done 18 of them). “That’s why you do speed work, to get yourself used to going the distance at pace. You could have run the entire 5K at about a 5-minute pace, you just didn’t know it.”
Later we went out to celebrate New Year’s Eve, but I was so tired I had trouble staying up to ring in 2010. That’s life as a runner!
Last night we played around with paces and race distances on a handy calculator on the Prairie Inn Harriers web site. To run a 2-hour Half Marathon means holding a pace of 5:41 per kilometre for 21.1 kilometres.
Gulp.
I can do it.
Hello Ms. T,
I was trying to say that races are run just below your threshold to way above your threshold. A marathon is run just below your threshold (a heart rate a few beats per minute below your threshold), a half marathon at your threshold, or even just above, a 10k with your heart rate about four beats per minute above the threshold, and a 5k about eight beats a minute above the threshold. You were running at half marathon to 5k pace during the race, which was excellent: it’s hard to run really hard right from the start unless you warm up extremely well, which we didn’t, and unless you have recent 5k experience as it hurts so much to run that hard. To set your best possible time on a given day you really need to get used to running at that intensity.
Yes, you did great! Four months to the half and that new PR!