Owls Count

I have lived in Reading for five and a half years and often taken some notice of the local half marathon, but not too much. Last year, while in China (IIRC), I was talking with one of my colleagues and we came to the idea of running this year.

My preparation had not been ideal. At the beginning of January I was ill and missed a 10k race I had intended to run. Then the 10mile race I had planned for February was cancelled. This meant that Reading was my first road race and I was nervous.

On the morning I got up reasonably early, had breakfast, and then walked slowly down to Green Park. I wandered around for a while, handed my kit bag into the tent, finally met up with my colleague, and went to the start. I vaguely did some of the warm up, and went for a light jog around the start area. Then it was joining the crush of people in my section of the start area. I had a plan of running 1:40 and to do this positioned myself at the start just behind the pacers.

The gun went off and we moved nowhere. About ten seconds later we managed a couple of paces before stopping again. Then slowly we started to move and crossing the start line a bit over two minutes after the gun went off. The first mile felt slow, particularly any corner where we all bunched up and slowed. The second and third miles included much of the uphill of the course and I felt I was moving at a good pace through these. The fourth and fifth miles were flat and then downhill – I moved well, felt comfortable, and was going at a suitable pace.

However, somewhere during the downhill around the five mile mark I tweaked my calf. Not badly enough to stop me running altogether, but certainly enough to slow me down by nearly a minute a mile for the next four miles. Between nine and twelve miles I slowed further and was really struggling to keep moving. Particularly demoralising was the number of people going past me at this stage. I managed to speed up a bit for the final mile and had a good sprint finish in the stadium.

My final (chip) time is 1:48:01, which I am reasonably happy with. My mile splits were: 7:57 – 8:04 – 7:51 – 7:32 – 7:31 – 8:07 – 8:22 – 8:17 – 8:27 – 8:48 – 8:58 – 8:58 – 8:18. I did not spot the four and eleven mile markers, so the splits on either side of those are half the two mile time for those sections. At the front of the field some course records were set.

There seems to have been some organisational problems with the event – running out of many items. The one criticism I had on finishing was that the kit tents were ordered by race number and the race numbers assigned by expected finish time. This meant that the tent I wanted was packed and it took a while to get my kit bag back.