Today's Journal
This morning was an early rise, up at 4.20am and arrived at the drop off point near the Gateway Bridge at 5.20am. Today I was focussed on breaking the 50min barrier. The first aim was to get to the start with the least amount of stress. That was achieved and arriving early enabled me to 'take in' some of the atmosphere that such an event creates. It was a little cool this morning with the temperature at the bridge roughly 5degrees other than that the conditions were ideal. At 6.20am I got prepared took off the excess clothing placed it in my bag and sent it off in the baggage truck, bound for New Farm Park. For the race today I was using the 2 bottle fuel belt (1 x water & 1 x sports drink). With 20min to go had a gel, used most of the water in the bottle to wash down the gel. After taking in the water at the start, I didn't use the bottles throughout the race...hmmm..maybe a bit of extra weight I could of done with out...who knows.....
This year I was determined not to get stuck too far back at the start. The strategy used was to line up to the side of the gap between the blue zone and red zone and when they bring everybody together jump in. This worked really well, I was about 5 m from the start line.
The race started about 10mins late. Eventually we were off and racing!! Pat Caroll was the 50min pacer and therefore the goal was to stick with him for the 50min pace. The climb up the southern side of the gateway began, it was a good pace, however, a little more effort was required to stick with Pat. The top of the bridge was passed and it was down hill for about a 1km this was an opportunity to begin to get into a rhythm; however, in viewing the Garmin it appeared we were keeping about a sub 40min pace!!!! At the 4km mark I made a very wise decision and left Pat to continue his run and work to my own pace and strategy. I dropped the pace back to about a 4 min pace having averaged about 3:45min for the first 4km. This was a much better and manageable strategy. Around the 6km mark the flu that I had early on in the week began to rear its ugly head (the head got a little heavier, but other than that all was going ok) From the 7 to 10km marks maintained a 4:13-4:17min pace. For the final 2km pushed it a little harder 10-11km: 4:09 & 11-12km: 4:02.
At the finish I had achieved the goal of under 50min by finishing in a time of 48:29min. I was quite pleased with this as the last time I raced this course in 2005 I ran it in 52:40min
Post Race Reflections
After the race a short warm down and a stretch. The calves were sore (on a 1 -10 scale..10 being the worse...I would rate them at 5-6) While I was standing round for the rest of the day I continued to stretch and will be looking forward to the stretch session later this afternoon. Aerobically the body was fine.
Could prepare a little better in terms of dinner the night before...not really happy with that part of it, as I was unable to have the usual pre-dinner pasta meal. (the place was just too busy too get an order). I tried something a little different in terms of breakfast, which seemed to work well. This involved the usual bottle of sports drink and banana and also added 1 pancake with maple suryp.
Overall a successful outing and one that allowed me to experiment with a number of aspect of my preparation and race strategy.
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