Ottawa half marathon

Yesterday was the Ottawa Half Marathon, what a wonderful race it is! If you never did this race please do so, there was around 40k runners there who ran one of the week end race. From the kid marathon, which was so cute to watch, to the Ottawa marathon. Here's how my race looked like.

Sunday morning I woke up early, walked around the hotel and grabbed a coffee and a sandwich at Tim Horton's. I then met with some friends who were running the full mary and chatted with them a bit. Then back to the hotel to get ready and headed to the race starting line.

My plan was to stay at 5:00/km or so to finish the race in 1h45. I was pretty sure that I could keep this up if everything went good and that I had good legs that day.

Martine, a friend of mine who is in the tri club, was doing the half too. But with 9-10k people on the starting line there was no way I could have find her.

And there we go, I wave to my wife and daughter and start running, making sure to get into my pace and not too fast and then I hear "BOB" It was Martine just behind me, how funny that she saw me in the middle of all those runners.

So we started running together, that was cool to have someone to chat with instead of being all by myself. Around the 5km she told me to go, she had a knot in her stomach and she didn't want to slow me down. I stayed with her to see if it would pass and it seemed to so we kept running together. I told her we already had a quarter of the race done so nothing to worry about.

By the 8km or so we were crossing back to Ottawa and while we were on the bridge I saw that the 1:45 rabbit was slowly getting away from me and I didn't like that. So I pushed a bit while crossing the bridge to try to keep her in sight at least. When we got on the other side of the bridge I realized that I had lost Martine. At that moment I decided to go for my own run and just pushed the pace to get back to the rabbit. I stayed with the 1:45 group for a while, always keeping them close by.

It was weird because my Garmin was giving me the km split earlier than they were on the course. At that point I realized that I couldn't trust the Garmin on that particular course because it was probably longer. So I started counting my overall time versus the km on the course to make sure I was on pace to PR.

By the 15th km or so I knew I had everything to get a PR, I was faster than my planned pace of 5:00/km and even if the course was a bit longer there was no problem at all beating that score.

At the 16th I decided to lose the rabbit and I started pushing. For the next two km I pushed a 4:48 and a 4:41 km, honestly in my mind and my body it felt more like two 3:00/km split but what can I do :P At that point I knew in my mind I was wayyy ahead of the bunny and then I heard someone yell , "lets go 3km to go, we can run that in our sleep". Yeah you are right, that was her like 0 feet behind me.

I laugh a little bit at that point, I pushed so hard to get away from that pack just to realize that they were behind me the whole time :P

At that point I just gave what I had left in me to get to the finish line as fast as possible. My friend Patrick told me he would be waiting for me on the left side of the road at the 500 meters mark. So I started checking when I got there, saw him slapped his hand and yelled "PR Baby!!"

I then ran everything I had left to get to the finish line with a really big happy smile on my face :)

My wife and daughter were by the finish line but I couldn't see them sadly. But I got that PR, even if my training for that half mary was far from being perfect.

Now I got to get faster, because I would like to run a half mary at least that fast to finish my half Iron in Sept ;)

I don't think I could have run faster with the training I had. My injury last winter didn't help but not much I can do about it. Now I got to train harder in the next month to get faster for the next one in August.

Total - 1:43:50
Age group : 151/574
Overall : 1207/9207