Larne Half Marathon 2012 Review – 2nd Half Marathon Ran In 2 Weeks

After last night’s pop tart scoffing debacle I was feeling extraordinarily tense en-route to the half marathon. This was not helped by my drinking of 3 giant cans of Monster in quick succession.

The day did not start well when I managed to break my shoelace and repeatedly stab myself on the hand with my race number pins at registration. It took me 25 minutes to put the race number on my shirt as I was so worked up that my hands were shaking.

Perhaps this whole cherade of drinking a bucket load of energy drinks isn’t paying off…

My plan again was to start on a 10:30/min mile and gently increase the pace so that I was running a 2:15 half marathon by half way and to continually increase the pace by a few seconds per mile after each mile ran.

Turns out that this was a little ambitious as I hit the wall at mile 8 whilst tackling a pretty brutal hill in the heat. I tried not to let it get to me too much and pledged to just finish the run and managed to pace myself almost perfectly around 9:59/min mile for five miles in a row.

I was very close to giving up at 12.6 miles but was overjoyed when I seen that the last bit was largely downhill.

At this point my spirits soared, but my speed did not.

I was not taking any chances. There is nothing worse than sprinting for the line only to stop 50m short of the clock to cackles of laughter from the crowd.

I finished in 2:13:05, which wasn’t too bad given that it was my 2nd half marathon in 6 days.

Best moment of the race was being overtaken by a sprinting man in his late 60’s, who was wearing an ‘L’ learning plate on his back. I nearly keeled over when I seen him.

I’m glad that I ran both of them in such a short period of time as the experiences have increased my motivation to train more for the upcoming Belfast Marathon. I treated both as training runs.

If you’re thinking of doing something similar whilst training for a marathon, then I can’t recommend running two half marathons in a row enough.

As long as you have enough time to get in a few more serious long runs before hand you’ll enjoy the experience and feel better equipped to handle the race atmosphere in the long run.

Geddit. Long run……………………….

I’m going to stop typing now.