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Moraghan Training - Stevie G
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Looks like a great weekend all round. Some smashing PBs.
The kids did Green Park Challenge, which turned out to be a few hundred metres longer than last year, so an improvement in speed for them. They're happy, but no cereal in the goody bags this time. Also, with the new start and route for the Green Park challenge there was no sanctioned way to get back to the stadium in time for the finish as we had to cross the course
It was nice to be stood in the sun almost half-way to watch the runners go by, struggling to put the correct real-world name to the faces going past. Lots of coffee, food and clapping. I always find it slightly ironic that you chaps at the front make it look like a walk in the park whereas the BOPers really look like they're starting to suffer. It's a long old day for some of them.
In a bizarre change of place AG shouted my name out as he went past. I didn't spot him incognito.
It's important to cheer on the supporters, I am just looking at purchasing a club vest as we speak. £40 for a singlet though, ffs!
Club kit pricing is ridiculous with the new supplier. Slightly put off by it too.
I did see a guy running up the front in one of the funny speed suits - like a one piece vest and shorts. A tad too short in the leg though.
Thought I'd add some variety with a report on Fleet Half which I did yesterday. Plan was to aim for slightly sub 6'30 and have a crack at 1'25. Calf injury in the weeks leading up didn't help so by the day had adjusted to "set off around 6'30 and see what happens". Anyway got to the start in good time with a decent warm up and stretch, 15 mins to the gun; all set except.. forgotten to put my chip on. Cue a mad dash back to the car so an unanticipated extra 1 mile tempo warm up passing many runners I knew thinking I was nuts charging around in the wrong direction 10 mins before the start!
Race starts bang on time and settle into my 6'30's after the usual too fast first. Good pace all around and great support as it does a loop around Fleet with two laps of the High St. Then out into the undulating countryside which is picturesque and I keep the 6'30's till 10 miles when, as usual, I begin to fade and end up just sub 1'26. Last mile is pretty much all uphill which is an 'interesting' twist especially as it felt so warm in the sun at this stage (though in reality was only 12 degrees).
Not a time to impress most on here but good enough for 4th V50 in a field of around 2500 (or 140 if we're talking V50's).
Great race by the way; perfectly organised, inexpensive, easy to park and a decent quality field. Would highly recommend it. Can't understand why so many do Reading when this is on the same day and only a few miles away.
Pete, very nice half there, and I can remember when 1:26 seemed really fast to me, so swings and roundabouts. I do want to do Fleet some day, but Reading will take precedence for me because it's my town, with my clubmates marshalling, and I get a ton of support, plus there's always the chance of counting for team places.
Dean, superb half. That is a really impressive time off no specific half marathon (or even long distance) training and indicates an ability to go much faster if you ever wish to do so. Shame about the :00, always makes you wonder if you could have squeezed another second off. Really good report too. I suspect I know exactly who the 'Fifty Shades' lady was - was it Rebecca Robinson? Small, green vest? I ran the whole of the Cardiff Half with her, and I recognised your panting description immediately without even checking if she was in the race.
Lit - you do win, but you were also up at almost 3 in the morning and I wasn't, so now I win.
Stacey a fellow Herne Hiller won the Fleet half - £350, good morning's work! I kind of let the training group side down yesterday, seeing as I was 9 minutes behind Mr Kimpton
. I'll let him have this one!
Annoyingly I was one of only 5 in the whole race whose 15 &20k chip times didn't register, so the first gap you come to on the results is me..
Just off on a gentle 5 miler, ankle feels strangely OK which is good. Ric - that xc looks great, shame there weren't more of them this season!!
Our club champs race was Fleet yesterday as Reading falls outside our guidelines of "a mix of distances up to half marathon, and all events must be reasonably local, not sold out months in advance and be proper running events (so no Tough Mudder or similar). They should also be reasonably priced and preferably non-commercial (or at least not massive commercial events)."
Simon "Jason Scotland-Williams" Coombes
Dean - Fantastic HM result and report. You can obviously go quicker with the right training (if and when you care to do so) but I'll still take this as another target for my Richmond HM in May!
Well I've finally joined a few of you in the sub-33 club. 32:49 (chip) at Eastleigh, and it's chip I'll be quoting as I momentarily squeeze into the top 10 V40 rankings for the year, with three V40s all on 32:50. And it's a whole two seconds inside my track pb. Hurrah!
Dachs/Simon - Any chance of us having a three-way smack-down on the track or maybe in Battersea Park some time over the coming months? I'm bang up for this running lark now!
Put your bike away for the winter PP? Well done on a PB.
Nice one PP!
Cheers guys!
Cat - Yeah, I'm ramping up the running miles in long-term prep for Berlin this year, so 70mpw+ average so far, and haven't logged a proper bike ride since getting back from Mallorca last October. Have managed 24 spin classes this year though, and will get the posh bike out soon for a bit more of a balance of run/bike over the Summer.
dachs - early on in the race there were a lot of shouts for a rebecca so i assume its the same lady. shes a good runner. and for me trying to find that extra second...it wasnt there today i gave everything i had. i normally finish stronger but had to use a lot of that juice between mile 10-13 just to get me there.
simon - hmmmm missing chip times very suspicious...although i suppose if you were going to lie about a time you would have said 69.10
Ric - apologies i missed your report, good to see you out there racing.
Philpub - nice work - that 10k pb seems to have been a long time in the making, i bet now its broken you will sail through the 32s quickly.
also just put in my half time into mcmillan to see what times it calcultates for other distances:
off a half 72 it calculates this time v my current pb
800m 2.00 v 1.59
mile 4.28 v 4.26
5k 15.33 v 15.35
10k 32.18 v 32.20
reasonably aligned
Blimey - looks like McMillan has used you to set it's algorithm!
Cheers Dean.
I ran that race without running one single mile faster than a 7:15 in nine weeks. To think that let me run sub six pace on the flat with no great effort.
I think I've built a big enough base now. Its time to start feeding some speed and power into the mix.
As an update to the Middlesex result. My club had six runners in the race, 2 V40's and 4 V50's.
3 runners to score. So we had an incomplete V40 team and an extra V50, Note: A V50 could have run as a V40.
The V40's were 1st and 2nd (team manager was actually the first) and the V50's were 1st 2nd, 4th and 6th (me). I would have been 11th V40.
So the medals to the V40's were individual gold and silver. And the V50's team gold and individual gold and silver.
Even if I had run as a V40, our club would have got a team gold, since 20 points won. (ie 1 + 2 + 11 = 14. our potential score).
I'll wait until next Sunday to see if there's a club left to resign from.
🙂
PP, it was a result that was clearly coming, but no less gratifying for it, good stuff.
I have pencilled in the Battersea Park 5k on Monday 13th July, and the BMC Regional race at Eltham on 22nd July as a double headed summer 5k focus, if you want a tear up at either of those. Due to the joys of family life, these are of course always subject to change. Otherwise I'm expecting to make the odd Watford 3k appearance during the summer.
nice report Ric.
PP, the quality I've long expected from RW's favourite geezer! How did you find the 9am Eastleigh start then? Did you stay over or make the trek on the day? Great course isn't it, one small climb and a lot of it feeling downhill. Definitely feels better than Chichester which has a couple of climbs, not to mention the one for the first 1/2km!
Dean, that's just ridiculously to calculation. Reminds me a bit of UG who had a 5k and marathon matching to the second. A far cry indeed from my longer distance time writing shorter stuff I simply can't cas.
3miles pootled out today.Tight.Obviously.
Cheers SG,
I'll get over being run out of the medals in about another two minutes. Failing short term memory is great for forgetting minor skirmishes.
I doubt if those skirmishes meted out by your namesake and skrtel yesterday will be forgotten so soon. Gits!
Apparently our club chairman resembles this chap.
I have to be careful, it seems when he didn't get his way over the agreed date to the AGM, he took legal action.
As for training. The post race run this morning was my easiest yet. I had better be careful, that sort of luck might have a price to pay.
First session Wednesday. Nothing special, just fast for one minute, with equal time recovery. 12 of these should do.
I used to go nearly 400 meters on the first of these once and finish with barely 300m with the last. Swimming in lactate! that's almost drowning.
🙂
I am in America. Though I did also wake up at 3 in the morning due to my body thinking it was 7. Bloody jetlag.
I win. Watching my adopted country New Zealand take on SA in the cricket.
Anyone doing the Hillingdon Half Marathon, April 12th?
🙂
Congrats on the runs at the weekend!
Quackers! I'm doing Hillingdon (unless I fall off a hill next week!)
Rebeccas seem to be everywhere, I had one come past me at about 11/12 miles, full of running and getting lots of support. It's the kind of image that makes me want to get faster. One thing I noticed in the race was that the last few miles I was making my way through the field nicely but still losing time. I think the general slowing of those ahead made me think I was still going faster than I was.
I have a hamstring tear in my left leg, I think it was the right one after Wokingham. I definitely need to do some strengthening/stretching in this area.
Dachs - I've just re-annotated the 13th on my Google calendar from light blue (pencilled in for the sake of it) to dark green (definite possibility). Will have a think about the 22nd; that weekend is the BMAF track champs, which I've pencilled in as a minor A race to target before switching back to marathon training. I suppose another all-out 5k a few days before might even be a good tune-up.
StevieG - I like Eastleigh, can definitely see me going back despite the early start. We drove down in the morning, so up at 5.15am
but thankfully someone else volunteered to drive so I could sit in the back eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches for brekky rather than getting up even earlier to make porridge. I judged it to be on a par with Chichester, i.e. pretty fast despite the incline, because you go up relatively short/sharp but have a nice gradual downhill/flat. 4-7k is a classic time to worry about slacking off pace so it was nice to have some momentum through that stage of the race. The early start also makes me think that I can knock a bit more time off that on a Saturday morning in Battersea Park, if I get up early enough!
Have you had it checked by a pro Andrew, or is that your opinion? You got round Sunday fairly sharply, unless it happened after? Bus' mate Gaz pulled out at 4miles with a hamstring strain, so i wouldn't have thought a tear would allow a 1.18 half!
Read Jock Itch's report on Reading on fetch. Entertaining, and definitely agree with his thoughts on the course. While not mountainous hills, still plenty to disrupt the flow.
What are people's views on the fastest halves? And based on actual course rather than the quality of field.
I'd probably list mine in order like this
In reality it would probably be harder to produce a quicker result at Silverstone than Reading, as the field is so incredibly thin at sub 1hr 20. They also seem to be trying their best to make it hard for non charity or London marathon preppers doing it, by having a stupidly early sign up date.
Gosport, also you need to catch on a non windy day, and not end up running alone for the long soul destroying stretches. Although having said this, I believe they've taken out the air field sections completely and made the whole thing a 2 lapper...which I presume makes it quicker.
Having said all this, I've never done more than 3 halves in a year, and I've done 2 by March already. I probably also want to save space for an "old favourite" which will be a local hilly number if needs be. However, I know there's quicker available than sunday...
Other people's thoughts?
In terms of the all of the courses I've run, I'd say the flattest are:
1: Gosport (on a still day)
2: Maidenhead (course has changed since I ran it though)
3: = Wokingham & Cardiff
5: Reading
The only other one I've run is Frome, and there's no point even mentioning that course in a conversation about flat halves, and Bath, which I ran 20 years ago and the course may well not be anything like what it was then (which I can barely remember anyway).
I've done many of the Southern ones over the years but not Windsor, Marlow or Basingstoke all of which are meant to be hilly and hard or Watford. Allowing for when they are in the year and the nature of the field I would put the ones I've done in the following order (speediest first);
1. Gosport*, 2. Wokingham, 3. Maidenhead 4. Bristol, 5. Fleet, 6. Oxford, 7. Reading, 8. Richmond, 9. Bracknell, 10. Bedford, 11. St Albans, 12 Henley 13. Eastbourne, 14 Burnham Beeches, 15 Up Flow Down Tow (Windsor to Marlow) 16, Wycombe, 17 Farnham Pilgrim (trail).
*Agree Gosport needs a day with little wind even on the new course otherwise it can shoot down to mid division!
Only ever done Woky and Windsor.
I have unfinished business at Windsor; it was my first and I wanted sub 2 hrs and got 2:05. That bloody 'long walk' where the finish arch doesn't get ever closer. I'l go back one I get sub 90 somewhere.
Interesting to see that Reading comes a fair few down the list. It’s billed as the flattest and fastest course, but that’s simply organiser propaganda. Obviously it’s not exactly slow, but the quality field hypes it. You’d also need to know the route quite well, to not be surprised by the hills, and to know where to maximise the pace, unless you’re simply on a big improvement curve, like Lit was last year.
Iron – i’d use the same phrase of unfinished business with Gosport. I’d like a better crack at that one day. 2010 i had a slight cold in the week before which took the top edge off. 2012 I entered but locked my back out 2 days before, missing the race. And 2013 I just remember being a non maximal performance, and getting cut adrift in no man’s land on the airfields.
I only tend to do 70-80 mile drives when I’m in top form, not unreasonably(!), so last year wasn’t any kind of consideration. Especially as I was up for doing the Marlow half. Which I missed, bruising some ribs.
Amazing looking back how few races we all miss due to injury/illness. Think my tally now must be about 6?
Ill for a couple, getting to the town but not finding the race (!) x2, bruised ribs, and locked back.
Couple in the Marlow days I shouldn’t have raced but did. Chest infection and fever! Not clever, but that’s club championships for you!
impressive set there by the way Pete! 17 different halves. How many in total? Pushing 50 odd? Or much lower and you simply like to try different ones?
I tend to stick to certain favourites, hence 8 races, out of 25 total.
Wycombe being my local was the natural early choice (6), before I realised that halves didn't have to be hilly and in mid summer. Silverstone then became my spring race of choice (5), before getting a bit bored with the course, and discovering Wokingham was much better standard.
Reading I tried when I made the move from bootleg races i'd come high up in, to high quality races to push for better times.
However, I only really plotted it this year because I could weasel in for free. £35 is a bit tasty for a race.