Big confidence boost at Nike Milton Keynes Half-marathon
After last week’s much needed easing off (just 17 miles incl
XCL race at
Bedford), this week saw a good Tue 10k session (3x 1.6M) on the tough
Bedford Road loop (av mile-pace 5:42). I skipped any further fast work this week to leave myself relatively ‘fresh’ for the MK half-marathon on the Sunday. Total mileage for week = 47.
The MK half-marathon had always been a key point in the marathon training schedule. The theory was that, if M training was going well, this should be borne out in my HM performance. Apart from a slight breeze, conditions were excellent - temp around 3 deg C and sunny and a fairly flat course.
The start for this race has been moved to the
Xscape Centre to cater for larger numbers. Parking was plentiful, but when I arrived about 40min before the start, the queues for baggage hand-in were ridiculously long (I suspect loo queues would have been similar). Ollie and I decided to jog back to the back to the car and change by way of a warm-up (and civilised loo-break at a hotel) and ended up back at the start with 10
mins to spare.
We had to wait for the 10k race to start first, which we quite quickly caught up with. This was quite well
marshaled with 10k runners being kept over to the left. The first 3 miles seemed all downhill and my average mile-pace after 3M was about 5:51! Apart from 1 mile that was almost entirely run into the breeze, mile-splits continued to be mostly between 5:58 and 6:05 for the rest of the race. The main exception was the last mile where all the height lost in the first few miles was made up rather quickly!
The result of all of this was
a fantastic, nearly 2 minute improvement over my HM PB of last December at St Neots: time 01:19:09 (pace 6:02.5/mile). I was absolutely thrilled with this and it shows that the M training has boosted my endurance without any cost to speed. In fact, I ran at my 10-mile PB pace for 13.1 miles.
An added bonus was beating the Club's longest ever standing Club Record - the MV45 HM mark set by Billy Crone in 1990 of 01:19:59.
This was one of those races when you run in ‘the zone’. The miles just flew by, and whilst I was working hard, it was never strained and I was confident of maintaining my pace, even over the mentally tough middle/latter stages of the race.
The weather seemed to be a dominant factor in week 1 of my 3-week taper, specifically the wind. Tue saw my final full 10k session before M-day and it was a tad breezy in parts. It continued to be breezy in several other runs, including a short (6-mile) marathon paced effort on Thu. 
