The Horrie and Belinda Show

17/12/06

I matched Belinda's efforts by running my second PB in consecutive half marathons. After a good fortnight's training since the Central Coast Half, I decided to have a crack and see what I had. I met up with Sportsman who was backing up after the Kurrawa to Duranbah 50km last week at the start and he was thinking of running around 90 minutes. We set out with the aim of running 4:20/km. We managed the first 10km in 43:09 which was 11 seconds ahead of target. We managed to stay on pace running up the big climb after the turnaround and then we were stopped at the busway for 11 seconds. We were bang on target at 13km. The climb up the hill after the first drink station the second time around was taking its toll and I started to drop behind a bit. As the course descended down the hill, I was working hard to hang on. The split at 15km told me the pace had dropped quite a bit and was getting closer to 4:30/km. Sportsman asked what my HR was doing and it was getting close to max so it was now just a matter of holding on the best I could. The split for 15-20km confirmed that I was still managing to hold 4:30/km. So to get the PB, I just had to crank it up as best I could and Sportsman and 2 others who had been running around us had the same idea. They all pretty soon put a gap into me. So after a 4:42 final 1.1km, I managed to stop the clock at 92:49 for a 16 second improvement on Central Coast.

Belinda ran with Chunderbolt for the first 15km before he decided he wanted to stretch out. After this Belinda slowed the pace and was happy to be running on her own and finished comfortably in 2:11 for a nice training run.

18/12/06

I headed out for a pleasant 6km in just under half an hour to help with the recovery and the legs are feeling great.

You sure recover quicker from a half than you do from an Ultra. ;-)