Race #566 - Run the South Half Marathon - Charlotte NC - 06/29/24
Touted as the "Hottest Half Here," the Run the South Half Marathon lived up to its billing this year. The temperature at the beginning of the race wasn't unbearable at 77 degrees, and even the humidity wasn't 100% (it was 88% according to the weather app). I think maybe the culprit was the dew point, although I don't know what it was. I do know that I was sticky and sweaty before the race and didn't even do a warmup.
I'm not sure I've explained how I use the Jeff Galloway Run Walk Run technique. I keep my watch set to alert me every 20 seconds, so I can run 20 seconds then walk 20 seconds, and that's how I do most of my training. In races, I run however many 20-second intervals I'm comfortable with and then just walk 20 seconds in between, so I may run three 20-second intervals (1 minute) or six 20-second intervals (2 minutes) then walk 20 seconds before running again. I just go by what feels right at the time, so if I'm going downhill I may just keep running until I get to the bottom, or if I'm running uphill I may just run 20 seconds and walk 20 seconds. That might not work well for anyone else, but it's what I'm most comfortable with.
Instead of starting the race in the very back, as I have been doing lately, I decided to start just ahead of the 2:15 pace group, hoping to stay ahead of them the entire race. I kept the first 4 miles a little under a 10-minute pace, which is just right for me these days.
The next four miles (miles 5 through 8) were a little slower, between 10 and 11 minutes per mile, so the heat was starting to get to me but it wasn't a major problem.
As you can see by the graph below, the wheels came off in the 9th mile, when my pace dropped to 12:03. All of the last 5 miles were over a 12-minute pace, including a dismal 13:59 in mile 11. By then I was walking almost as much as I was running. It was becoming difficult to run 20 seconds then walk 20 seconds, so part of the time I would run for 20 seconds and walk for 40 seconds. It's the first time I've ever done that, but I rationalized that it was better than having a heatstroke.
As I approached the finish line, I could see the clock was getting close to two and a half hours, which was a little troubling since my slowest time in 137 previous half marathons was 2:15. As I thought about it, though, I realized that if I can keep on running, the older I get the slower my times will be. For now, I'll keep hoping to be under 2:15, but a good secondary goal will be to stay under 2:30. If I'm running 5 years from now, the times I consider miserable for now will not seem so bad.
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| With the green lines representing walk breaks, it's easy to see how I got progressively slower throughout the race. I didn't walk during the first mile, then went into my typical walk/run pattern of a minute or two of running followed by a 20-second walk. Miles 5 through 8 show walk breaks closer together, then the last 5 miles, there are too many walk breaks to count, thus a 12+ minute pace. In the end, I had run 1 hour and 53 minutes and walked a little more than 35 minutes. Below, I'm including the same data from the RAD Half Marathon that I ran just 20 days before this one. |
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| It's easy to see why I was about 15 minutes slower today. At the RAD Half, I ran for 2 hours and 1 minute and only walked for 11 and a half minutes. This is the first time I've looked at this data, which I'll remember in future races. |
On the bright side, even though this was my slowest half marathon ever by almost 15 minutes, I still managed to win the Over-70 age group and finished precisely halfway down the totem pole (187 of 374!), so I was faster than half the field, many of whom had the same problems I experienced.
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| Uh, yeah, I was in meltdown mode. |
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