Royal Parks Half Marathon 2009
The autumn fairy tale continues. My last start on Sunday in the Royal Parks half marathon was a total success. I was planning to take it easy which certainly wasn’t the case as I pushed hard enough to take a solid bite out of my half marathon PB. I finished in 1h 42m 18s that is a time I hasn’t even dreamed about as it is 16min faster than my result from Royal Parks Half 2008, last year and 5min faster than in Lisbon in March this year.
The weather was I could say perfect for running. I also started in the green, second wave of runners (1h30m-1h45min). Combination of those two factors made it a nice task to control the race and keep my target pace of 4m55s/km, here and there saving couple of seconds per kilometer. As people around me were as fast or faster than me there was no problem with overtaking in the crowd, water was served in bottles (!) so the waste of time was negligible.
It is one of those races I will try doing every year, really enjoyable in Hyde Park were I do my longer training runs anyway, feels like the home race. Plus I am really starting to like half marathon distance.
Unfortunately I am carrying a knee injury now I am not sure if I can recover before the Frankfurt Marathon on Sunday next week. Chances are 50/50, I couldn’t be able do it today for sure.
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Apropos my race strategy I intended to keep 5m10s/km for first 32 km then allow a fade of 35s. I’ve struggled to keep the target pace. First of all as I already mentioned it was very hot and having trained in London I am not used to that, much prefer to run in 10C-20C and even during a rain. Second: it was very, very packed, I overtook almost 1000 people during the run which costs time (next time I will try to start from earlier pen, this time it was F). Additionally drinks are served in plastic cups without a lid, almost impossible to drink and run so the time spent at water stations easily doubles. As result I was always below the 5m10s/km and had to make much bigger effort to keep the on-target pace by not allowing myself that sweet 35sec fade in last stages. I did slow down but less than planned and less than I would like to. At the end I got to the finish line 58sec faster than planned. It cost me a lot though.
There is a ground rule that says that the more miles one does before a marathon the better finish time will be. Second ground rule says: don’t injure yourself! To be able to combine those conflicting rules we need to run often so the cumulative distance is adding up but still maintaining a reasonably low risk of injury. It is going to be my second marathon so I tried to leverage experience from the preparation for the first one. I knew what I could improve. In the first one my training was based only on the Long Weekend Runs and supplemented by non strictly running activities: squash, football etc. I think my total running mileage for entire training was something around 200km done during 12 weeks. It’s is really low and looking back I don’t know how I managed to finish under 4h mark. Learning from that I decided to introduce more often runs and settled on 5 times a week plus added 6 weeks to the duration of the training to enable building distance slowly and gradually. The overall structure of the training is similar to many others: there are 3 types of runs: short, medium and long and the distance is gradually growing until the long run gets to 32km (20 miles) around 4 weeks before marathon. With 5 runs I stuck to: 2 short, 2 medium, 1 long and decided to do two runs with the maximum distance 32km (4 and 6 weeks before the race). Not being able to quit all my social/sport activities I added on top of that 5-a-side football and squash, once a week each. I think it supplements the speed training which I didn’t want to introduce this time round yet. Every couple of weeks of increased work load there is a rest week with decreased distance that gives us the recovery time.
I was nicely surprised to find a well maintained biking path which stretches along the entire peninsula. Between Wladyslawowo and Jastarnia where the the land is as narrow as couple of hundred meters the path wanders very close to the water line from the southern 
The next part of the route from Jastarnia to Hel leads through very beautiful pine forest. The surface of the path changes couple of times and the path itself behave more like a snake trying to get to a juicy bite. The path is used by bikers but it is safe as they rarely go fast and there is not many of them.
If you prefer to run in a shade then there is a path from 
If you see yourself training like this 
It is an awesome tour of Paris. The route leads from the Champs-Elysées to the Place de la Concorde, Rue de Rivoli along the Louvre, then Place de la Bastille and roundabout of the Place de la Nation. Not far next is the second biggest park in the city: Bois des Vincennes where runners make a 7km loop. Half marathon mark is on the way back from the park to Bastille where slight downhill helps save some energy for the second and final part. From Bastille the route goes towards the river Saine and the next 10km give everyone chance to enjoy river side views of Paris. The famous-infamous 31km mark is next to the Eiffel Tower where couple of hundred meter up hill stints remind about the distance behind and the already drained to minimum resources in the body. The biggest park in Paris, Parc de Boulogne, is a place for final effort where each passed kilometer brings us closer to the finish line on the Avenue Foch overlooking Arc de Triomphe.
On personal note I am happy with my own performance, far from above mentioned time, but within my sub-4h target. The 
Update on my running journey. Week and a bit ago, on Sunday 22nd March 2009, I’ve participated in the 
I spent some time at the beginning of the year looking for a marathon training plan suitable for me. If I had to find a common pattern in the structure of the plans I found it would be fair to say that most of them consist of a one long weekend run (20km - 25 km) and, depending how long and intensive the plan is, 2 - 3 other shorter runs (5km - 10km, intervals, hills) a week. The main message usually is: the more kilometers a week you run, the better you are prepared. D’oh!
It is just a quick post to give an update on my plans for running for next half a year. After finishing 
As it is going to be my first Marathon I wanted to run some other longer run just before Paris to boost my confidence and I have chosen 
12 October, that was a great day. For many reasons.
