Close enough... 2017 Sydney Half Marathon race report.
I have to say this: the Sydney half marathon course is a sod. It’s twisty, narrow and crowded, plus it has too many short, but nasty hills. A fast course it is not, as evidenced by the fact that even the elite runners (including the Kenyans) have trouble completing it in under 65 minutes. Despite that, I set my own far more modest half marathon PB of 1h54m45s in this race five years ago. That seems a lifetime ago now, and for this year I was looking to simply try and beat two hours. Even that much was going to be a serious undertaking, as I haven't run under two hours in the last three years, and my last half marathon, the Almeria event last February, saw me clock my slowest ever half marathon time of 2h14m30s, so improvement by some considerable margin was called for. My training has been very good however, and a couple of test runs during my taper week leading up to race day seemed to indicate that two hours ought to be possible.
One of the main hurdles with this race is effective pacing, one of the main reasons for that being overcrowding on what are relatively narrow roads. In an attempt to overcome the crowding problems, a change was made this year to the start. Runners have always been divided into starting pens according to their qualifying or self-seeded time, but all the different waves had started together. This year each pen was allocated a different start time, with several minutes separating each wave. The start line was also narrowed, the idea presumably being that with the race stretched out in length, crowding would be less of an issue and the event more enjoyable for all. A noble attempt, perhaps, but I'm unsure as to how well it really worked as I found it more crowded than ever.
Conditions were pretty much ideal for the race, being cool, dry and windless and, as in Almeria, I started this race at the very back of my allocated pen. To run under two hours, I had to complete each kilometre in 5m40s or better. My race plan, such as it was, was to run the first kilometre comfortably within myself, not looking at my watch until the one kilometre mark and basing my race plan on whatever time that took. Well, lo and behold, I ran that first kilometre in exactly 5m40s, so I simply settled in and continued on at that pace. Or so I intended. In fact the first half of the race was so crowded that it was almost impossible to maintain an even pace as I was continually held up by slower runners, and then once seeing a gap, bursting through and making up for lost time – hardly ideal as a pacing strategy. The result was that I ran that first half as I did the previous year, i.e. overall way too fast, hitting the 10.55km half way chip mat in just on 58 minutes, putting me well ahead of schedule, but perhaps also overcooked.
The crowds did thin out a little in the second half, but still there were sections with considerable congestion, and I found pacing very difficult. As I said, pacing is a problem in this event anyway, due to the tight, twisting route, and the skyscrapers and tunnels which render your GPS quite inaccurate, and not in any predictable way. The general lack of distance markers make it doubly difficult. Despite this being the fifth time I’ve run in the event, I managed to conveniently forget all of that and put blind faith in the GPS which told me I was comfortably ahead of schedule and should quite easily break two hours. Right, of course, why should I worry?
Similarly, I did not take heed of the fact that last year I had also reached the half way point in 58 minutes, only to blow up badly in the second half, and finishing in a sore, slow and disappointing 2h06m. This year I was at least travelling somewhat better, but even pacing was still difficult, and then by about 17km it was simply hard work, and I was definitely slowing. Knowing though that all I had to do was hang on and I was sure to beat my target time, I did simply that: I put my head down and kept chugging away. The alarm bells didn't properly start sounding until well into what I thought was the 19th kilometre. We didn't seem to be where I thought we should be at that point, and by the time I realised that my GPS was way out of kilter with reality, it was too late to undo the damage done. When I thought there was only a touch over a kilometre to go, the race marker said 2km. I ran as hard as I could in case the marker was right and my watch was wrong (heaven forbid), but the last section is uphill and brutal, reality was dawning on me and a sense of dread descended. There was no point then looking at my watch, I just had to run as hard as I could and hope I had enough of a buffer to still break two hours.
Finally crossing the line, I stopped my watch and was more than a little disappointed to see it say 2h00m17s. It claimed I had run 21.65km, and it's this extra half kilometre anomaly that caused me to think I was well on target when in fact I was running rather slower than my watch led me to believe. I'm not blaming my watch though; I knew about this problem but just didn't factor it in this year and so paid the price.
Still, as someone later on said to me, if I had missed a 400m sprint target by 17 seconds, you'd score that as a miss. Being 17 seconds outside a half marathon target is a different matter, and can pretty much be considered to have hit the mark.
Yeah, that will do nicely. And it’s a huge improvement of over 14 minutes on my Almeria time, and in just three months.
Yeah, I’m happy with that.
May as well go for broke.
