Bath Half Marathon

Sorry for the delay in writing this report, at this time of year I have always been very busy organising the Trafford 10k

After having such a good run at the National Cross Country Championships, I was keen to keep the momentum going and put in another good performance here.  I wanted to get on a bit of a roll and get a good road race performance on the board in the run up to the London Marathon.

I decided I would ease down for the race which is something I don't often do for half marathons (as I only really tend to do do them in marathon build ups).  I had enough decent weeks in the bank this time to afford to do this. 

I had a target time for the race in mind, based on my 67:34 half marathon in January soon after returning from an injury layoff and my significant improvements in cross country races that followed.  I won't say what the target was but you can assume it was quite a bit quicker than 67:34!

My taper appeared to have worked well as my legs felt super and I cruised through 2 miles with the second group containing Simon Jones, Kairn Stone, Martin Williams, Rob Bugden and Simon Plummer amongst others.  But as we hit an incline in the third mile, I quickly fell away.  I ran strongly over the remainder of the race and improved my position throughout as a few runners peeled off the back of the group.  My final time was 67:58 which is nowhere near what I had hoped to run coming into the week and I felt that I should have been able to stay with the main group and it was a case of opportunity missed.

It's hard to say how much it affected my run but on the Thursday leading up to the race, I had starting to experience some frequent pains in my ribcage, on the right hand side about 5ins in from my armpit.  It came and went, but when it came back it was always worse than previous.  By the time I was in my hotel on Saturday evening for the race, it was a permanent stabbing pain and my breathing had become extremely shallow.  I considered withdrawing from the race but a hot shower and aggressive self massage to the ribcage coupled with an overdose on painkillers and I felt able to run. 

I feel like it affected my performance significantly but results are what counts so it's down to me to run well at Wilmslow Half Marathon and ultimately London!

Keep training hard,
Cheers
Dave