Monday, March 12, 2007

Marathon training diary no4: MK Half (11:03:07)

Julia, Ed and I took the opportunity to do MK Half as it starts and finishes on The Open University campus and uses some routes familiar to us on our regular runs at the OU and with Marshall Milton Keynes AC.

It was a beautiful sunny spring day with a brisk breeze and I was looking to run flat 8 minutes miles (3hr 30min marathon pace). We arrived at the back of a large start confident that our timing chips would give us a true time despite the delay crossing the start.

Julia and I ran a lovely controlled race. When we started to get too far ahead of our target time we slowed things down. The course was beautiful and really showed MK's parks off to their best.

I came in with Julia in a creditable 1hr 42 09 and Ed smashed her 2hr 15 target. The only downer on the day was that the timing chips didn't record the start so we had times from 'the gun'. This makes us look 3 minutes slower than we were - very annoying.

Still, 3hr 30pace is what we were aiming for and is exactly what we did. Julia has now taken a minute per mile per year off her MK time for three years running - very impressive.

Sue and Emma also improved our time by at least 30secs with some tactical shrieking.

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