Running

Bramley 20 for me yesterday, a bigger-than-I-was-expecting local race run by Reading Roadrunners, a lot of good club level runners use it for Spring marathon training (as was I) so I knew I wouldn't be troubling anyone for position. It's two laps of a 10 mile loop with a 10 mile race taking place at the same time. Quite nice to be able to give encouragement to the 10 mile runners in their last mile or so.

My race plan was to split the run into three parts. Eight miles feeling easy, eight miles at a tempo effort, and the final four miles pushing hard. All based on effort levels for which I had approximate paces in mind with a target of finishing in 2:30. If I can do 20 miles in 2:30 then I'm looking good for a decent marathon PB come April 2nd.
Of course the first 8 miles felt very easy and I was consistently faster than planned but everything felt good and I felt I was in control and not getting pulled along too fast so just went with it, chatted to a few people, remembered how loud hundreds of trainer-shod feet on tarmac can be, generally enjoying the experience.
There are two "hills" on the course and at the top of the first one at about six miles in there were some marshalls saying "well done you've made it to the top of the hill" and I was thinking "that was a hill?"
The second hill comes just before the eight mile marker so getting to the top of that short but fairly steep rise I started on the second of my eight miles and upped the effort. Still feeling relatively good and having passed the 10 mile mark you lose a lot of company as the 10 mile runners peel off into the finish funnel and we headed back out into the lanes. Ticking off the miles and concentrating on maintaining the effort level took me steadily up to 16 miles, I'd been slowly reeling in people ahead of me and passed a lot more than I was passed by. Still feeling reasonably good but by no means fresh, I tried to up the effort level a notch but found this pretty hard to maintain without really concentrating on it. I felt like I was going at about a 10k effort but noticed a loss of power on the little rises and false flats. I knew I had to get up the final hill at 18 miles without stopping and it'd be downhill all the way to the finish - it wasn't but it was a good way to motivate myself! Over the final two miles I reeled in another runner who had been in the distance for a long time and was passed by someone who I'd passed a lot earlier in the race. I wasn't blowing up and had upped the pace so this guy had paced it well. Managed to get up to what felt almost like a sprint finish to cross the line in 2:23:48 and Strava tells me I set a new HM PB by about 1 min in that run which is really encouraging as I set that HM PB when I was both several years younger and at what I often think of as pretty much my peak running fitness when I was on my way to London 2019.

Really pleased with how it went, I didn't eat anything on the course but they had some isotonic drinks at mile 5/15 so had that on both laps plus a bit of water. The temperature was pretty much perfect at around 10 degrees meaning I wasn't sweating too much, overcast with only a light breeze I think a bit more energy going in would have prevented a bit of the feeling of loss of power but very reassurring to see fruits of my labours over the past few months.