After many months working to establish a base of strength and running to build from going forward, September/October finally brought me to the start line of a race or two. This has involved as much easy aerobic running as I could currently tolerate with sessions being mostly hill-work based fartleks and the occasional road tempo, although with some niggles in the achilles the road tempos have been hard to tolerate. My body is certainly in a very different place than it was a few years ago and this has hard to accept on a mental and emotional level at times but acceptance is mostly there now. I was encouraged from more than one direction to think of myself as not necessarily the same runner I had been but to train to explore what post-thyroid me could do. So with the help of Coach Ben previously and Coach Chris here in Albany now, that’s what I am endeavouring to do.
I toed the line first at the Denmark Half Marathon, a small event outside the coastal town of Denmark, WA. This event is close to home but I hadn’t actually run on the trails or footpath that make up the course before the race so it was a bit of an unknown. What I soon discovered was that I had underestimated the hills it would contain. Now, my base training has involved plenty of running around up and down hills including some fartleks with segments of 6-8mins of all out running uphill, but this half marathon distance course was constantly up or down and fairly quickly into the race I felt like I was going to struggle to go the distance.
After getting out of the blocks quickly alongside the eventual winner (who finished about 6 minutes in front of me), I settled into 3rd place and… there I stayed. Clipping along fairly well behind 2nd place, the gap stayed roughly the same. Often I got a bit closer going up hill and just as often I drifted back going downhill but the gap didn’t change until the closing stages of the race. Said gap opened up on a fairly lengthy downhill section to a turnaround near the wind turbines that I just could not close on the way back up and as it happens, this was the beginning of my fade. Thought the remaining 5-6km of the race was predominantly downhill (undulating though, lots of up hill), my body had reached near its limited and I slipped back. As I slipped back, the guy behind me surged and strongly too. It seemed to me that he had cruised the first 16km because he finished very strongly and powered past me at about 18km to finish around a minute in front.
A shame to lose a podium place with only three kilometres to go but I had seen it coming and in hindsight, given the amount of running I’ve been able to do and the point I’m building from, my 91:30 finish on that particular course seemed like a pretty good result. Certainly a good starting point and on a gorgeous coastal course to boot. The field was fairly small in just the events second running but hosted on a long weekend here in Western Australia I could see it filling out year over year so hopefully it will be back next year.
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