Category: Half-marathon

Jakob halvmaraton

Without much training and without any time goal I participated in the Jakob half-marathon.

Up to 10 km things went smoothly. Then the steady uphill towards 11 km felt quite tough, although I sort of kept up the pace until about 14 km. From there it was a fight with a bit of walking now and then... The steady slow-down towards the finish shows in my 5k splits: 26:23, 27:25, 28:51, and 30:16. For comparison in 2012 on this course my 5k splits were: 23:47, 24:17, 24:20, and 24:09 - very steady and not slowing towards the end.

Here's a chart with the min/km times from the half-marathons I've run.

half-marathon_chart_2015-07-25

Next year I must remember to do one or two 90-120 minute training runs per month and things will go much smoother...

Jakob halvmaraton

I ran my 5th and fastest yet half-marathon in 1h 41min 52s (4:49/km) yesterday in Jakobstad.

Splits and pace for 5ks: 23:47 (4:45/km) , 24:17 (4:51/km), 24:20 (4:52/km), 24:09 (4:50/km)
Splits and pace for 10ks: 48:04 (4:48/km) , 48:29 (4:51/km)

The first 5k was maybe slightly too fast, but the last kilometer from 20k to 21k was the fastest, 4:43, so that shows there was plenty of energy in the legs at the end.

McMillan's calculator says a 1:42 half-marathon means a 10k should be doable in 45:45, and the full marathon distance in 3:35!

I ran this event in 2010 also.

Here's a graph of the km-pace for the five half-marathons I've run:

HCR2011 statistics

Using the same scraping scripts I wrote after last years marathon, it was fairly easy to scrape the HCR website and produce some histograms.

There are two python scripts, one that crawls the web (urllib) and finds the time-data (BeautifulSoup and re) and writes to a file (cPickle), and another that reads the files and plots (matplotlib) histograms: hcr2011_scrape

 

2011 Helsinki City Run

My fourth half-marathon. Not quite a personal best, and my excuse is that the course is a bit up-down hilly and has a lot of turns that slows you down.

Otherwise a solid run with no major problems. A lot warmer than last year, so I ran in shorts and T-shirt. I could put in some work on the uphills which made the HR go >170 and still recover to a reasonable HR 165 or so on the downhills or the flat bits.

My own garmin said 1:53:00, the chip time on the results website seems to be 1:52:57, and the time from the gun was 1:54:14.

The 5k times were: zero to 5k in 28:24, five to 10k in 26:30, ten to 15k in 26:09, fifteen to 20k in 26:25. In other words first 10k in 54:54 and the second 10k in 52:34.

Update: here's the GPS-trace.

Lanzarote (half) marathon

The plan was to run at a nice and even 5:40/km pace to finish in 4 hours, but after feeling OKish for the first two laps out of four, suddenly I felt overheated and dehydrated and stepped off after 22km.
The pace on laps 1 and 2 was exactly as planned, 27:30 for the first 5k (5:30/km), 28:25 for 5-10km (5:41/km), 28:10 for the third 5k from 10 to 15k (5:38/km) and 28:53 for 15-20k (5:47/km). I was on track to run that four hour marathon, but somehow in the warm and windy weather wasn't getting enough water, energy or, something else. Oh well, there's always next year...

Jakob halvmaraton 1:50:37

This week the plan was to do the last 20+ km run before the Helsinki marathon, which is in three weeks on 14 Aug 2010. But since I was in the region and there was a race, I did the Jakob half-marathon instead. Results and info at http://jakob-marathon.net/

This is a small event with 4-500 runners, so less walking, pushing, and passing in the beginning than at HCR or Forssa. I didn't really set a time-goal, just ran in the beginning at a pace that felt right, which today was around 5:11 to 5:20/km. There were four drinking stations at a little after 4, 8, 12, and 16 km which show up as slightly slower kilometers in the data. Towards the end a few faster kilometers would have maybe allowed a sub 1:50 time.

The grey background shows roughly the level of detail which google earth/maps provides in this part of the country...

"He de maraton e noo flaka beta!"

By popular demand, an openstreetmap rendering. Fiddled around with the openstreetmap.org website but could not get it to display my GPS trace on top of the map. When searching for "gps" ubuntu suggests tangoGPS, but that doesn't reder gpx-traces either. Then downloaded and installed Merkaartor, which does show gpx-traces after clicking around for a bit to learn how it works. At a zoom level which shows the whole route Merkaartor doesn't show individual streets, so I zoomed in a bit, exported two bitmaps (top/bottom) from Merkaartor, and manually stitched them together in GIMP.

Forssa half-marathon

I was a bit too far back in the start, and had to criss-cross among slower starters for at least the first 3 km. A strong side/aft wind made the first few kilometers easy downwind 'sailing', and luckily the route took a more protected less windy road after the turn at 10 km. After around 13km when it was windy again, now a side/head-wind, I slipstreamed in tour-de-france-style in the wake of a group of runners to avoid the worst wind. This course is very flat and fast, and I caught up with the 2-hour pace-runners(dressed in black tuxedos!) somewhere between 19 and 20 km.

Results and info: http://www.suvi-ilta.fi

While driving home through Perniö I saw some serious long distance runners taking part in a 100 km race. These people do 20 laps on a 5 km course, some in under 8 hours...

2:12:56 Helsinki City Run

Despite forecasts of rain during the week the weather cooperated nicely and we only got wet after 18 km or so.

At about 14 km my legs started to feel heavy, and after the last gatorade+water station at 17 km I started walking all the uphills.

I finished in 6345th place (yay!) out of 13100 runners, and the timing-chip time was 2:12:56, my own garmin said 2:12:59, and my official time (start-gun to finish) was 2:13:16.

Results and info here: http://www.helsinkicityrun.fi