"Ross ½ Marathon"

I was looking forward to running yesterday's event today, even though it did feel quite warm - I left home at around 3.15 pm and the temperature was about 15 with a tail wind for my outward leg. I picked up on an idea that brother-in-law Bruce mentioned in one of his emails about writing his splits on his arm in texta. As I wear my old glasses when I run, I jotted down each 1k split from an earlier run, as well as the progressive times, so I would have an indication of how I was going.

I had four bottles of Gatorade on my Fuel Belt and planned to drink one at the end of each 5k. Only this time, unlike previous occasions, I drank while running. I do find this hard because of my difficulty in breathing when running - I'm like a puffing billy!

I started off quite slowly - though the Garmin GPS had trouble getting its bearings so that could have influenced my slower time a bit. As it was, I was 44 secs slower today for the first kilometre than the splits to which I was comparing today's run. However, after the initial 1k split, each kilometre was faster than the comparison figure. Even though it was that much faster I felt surprisingly good during the whole run.

I must admit, though, that at about the 15k I did start to notice that I had been running much faster than initially planned. What was amazing was that I was able to keep running up the final hill, whereas I normally have to walk the steepest section on my longer runs.

In a sense today's run was a bit of a race as I was running against my previous best time (since resuming jogging in March) of 2hr 24min 12.81sec and today came in at 2hr 18min 45.25sec, meaning that I took a whopping 5m 27secs off that time.

A comparsion of my splits can be found at:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/comparison?activityId=369222844&activityId2=315406776

 If you decide to look at this comparison chart it will have reverted to miles (an American programme) but it will still give some idea.