London Marathon 2013 – 3 hours 50 minutes & 36 seconds

 

That was hard – very hard. And I’m not doing that again!  In the cold light of day I guess my time was ok. I beat my only previous other marathon time (London again from 9 years ago) by 24 minutes so I have to be happy with that but the second half of the race was just all pain for me.

The background of this is that I got a place through the ballot last year before deciding to concentrate on the triathlon targets for 2013. Consequently, although I’d upped my running distance quite a bit for the last four months or so, I was underdone on the long runs (+20 miles) coming into this. The one long pre race I entered, the San Dominico 20 miler, was cancelled due to the bad weather. Two Saturday’s ago I ran 34kms which was basically three times from home around Roath and the lake in Cardiff. That was fine but on the following Monday, trying to do some intervals, I felt my Achilles tighten. Since then it’s been no running and ice the Achilles twice a day. So I started the race with some trepidation. You don’t get the opportunity do the VLM often so I was going to do it and try and do it as fast as I could.

Here they come to the start at Blackheath. I must have walked a bit quicker!

 

Pre race I applied a non steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAIDs) gel on the Achillies and had a strip of Ibuprofen tablets with me. Interestingly on the radio on Saturday they were warning runners NOT to take any NSAIDs as a study of the Bonn marathon had shown issues with kidney and stomach problems. As anyone who  has run the VLM will know it takes ages to get going so I wasn’t worried about going out too fast and putting strain on the Achilles but even before I crossed the start line I could feel the aching irritation of it. 1km first drinks station and I’d popped my first tablet. The pain eased a bit and I tried to concentrate on an even pace but this is not easy at the VLM. I started in one of the middle pens. I’d thought I’d put down a reasonably fast target time on my application but obviously not as fast as a lot of others. It was a little bit irritating how many slow runners started near the front and I mean slow, not someone pacing correctly. The course is actually quite narrow (for 38k runners) and the spectator crowds so huge they tended to encroach off pavements etc. So it was slow/fast for about the first 15km. When a gap opened you really had to accelerate through it before it closed for another few minutes. There were so many runners running around on pavements, jumping on and running on central reservations. This is obviously not good for an evenly paced marathon effort.

I was happy getting to the half marathon marker in 1.44 but then, even after my 3^rd painkiller, the heel pain was increasing and I could feel myself sort of limping. This, together with what I can acknowledge now was tiredness, made me slow down. I was carrying my High5 gels and they seemed to go down ok, but it was getting quite warm. From about 25km it became a battle. I really was thinking of stopping but you realised the crowds just wouldn’t let you. They gave you “encouragement” even if you stopped to walk. I kept going mainly with the thought that my family and friends were at the 35km mark and that’s where I would stop. However by then, and I have to admit with a further tablet, my Achilles had eased a bit so I thought I could finish. As it turns out I got a very little bit of a second wind in the last 5kms and actually felt quite comfortable. Though not comfortable enough to think about a sprint finish at the end!  My splits are below and they are all over the place. Afterwards I made sure I took on plenty of water and it seems like I don’t have any issues with my pill popping. I certainly went way over any recommended limit and I’m not going to do that again but I think it allowed me to finish the marathon. A day later my Achilies doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it would (but only time will tell when I try and run next). Compare this with my quads – aaah!  I wonder how many days I will be walking down stairs backwards.

Split	Time Of Day	Time	Diff	min/km	km/h
5K	10:27:25	00:25:12	25:12:00	05:03	11.91
10K	10:51:25	00:49:12	24:00:00	04:48	12.5
15K	11:15:54	01:13:41	24:29:00	04:54	12.25
20K	11:41:04	01:38:51	25:10:00	05:03	11.92
HALF	11:46:34	01:44:21	05:30	05:01	11.99
25K	12:07:26	02:05:13	20:52	05:21	11.22
30K	12:36:56	02:34:43	29:30:00	05:54	10.17
35K	13:09:00	03:06:47	32:04:00	06:25	9.36
40K	13:39:49	03:37:36	30:49:00	06:10	9.73
Finish time	13:52:49	03:50:36	13:00	05:55	10.14