18th September finally arrives. Seven months of training and hard work finally (hopefully) paying off. The aim is to beat my PB and the 4-hour mark, anything faster is a bonus.
Couldn't sleep last night with all the excitement and enthusiasm, too much adrenaline. Woke up at 04:50 and got ready by 05:30 to catch the train to Milsons Point for a 07:30 start.
The environment is electric with thousands of marathon runners around, and music bands, and cheering crowd.
The start is pretty good and in the middle of all this madness and adrenaline, I start running with a bunch of other people, not worrying about how fast or slow am I going. It's when I hit the 15km mark that I realize that I am doing 12.5 kmph. Crossed the halfway point at 1:44:00 which is 5 minutes faster than my PB. Started running with "Matt" - a random runner I met during the run and he picks up the pace, enticing me with the prospect of finishing in 3:30 if we keep the pace up. This is when things start getting horribly wrong :(
The temperature has already risen to 28 degrees and trying to do something like this (running faster than you really should) is surely a bad idea. At the 27km mark, I start struggling to keep up and by the next kilometer, I tell Matt that I have to slow down. Jogged for a while at 10kmph but started cramping REALLY BAD. Power-walked for the next 9km at 7.5 to 8.5 kmph to minimize the time loss. There were hundreds of runners struggling with the heat, cramping, spasming, falling down... The walking strategy actually turns out to be pretty smart as I lost maybe 20-25 minutes but I minimized any physical damage. Started running at 10.5 kmph at 38km mark and kept it up till the finish line.
Net time: 3:58:36
First half 1:44:xx
Second half: 2:14:xx
Here's the runkeeper log:
Anyways, quite happy with the time and that's another item off life's checklist :-)
Some pictures from the event -
