Sunday Race Day (Dartford 10...ok, lets run a HM instead!)

Sunday was planned like a military operation.

Alarm set for 6:30, Nanny child-sitting booked for 8:00, estimated time of arrival at Dartford for the 10 mile race approx 8:10...it was literally planned to within 5 minutes.

Alarm went off on time.  Jumped out of bed.  Unfortunately Izzy heard the alarm too and woke up just as quickly.  I shoved her iPad in her hand and told her to watch some Cartoons on CartoonHD, possibly the greatest kids app in history which seems to have almost every single Disney Film and Cartoon on it ever made.  She was occupied, I went to have my bowl of porridge for pre-race fueling.

Then my phone bleeped...email from the race director...

Update Sunday 19th January 0630 hrs

Runners we are very sorry, but due to us being unable to guarantee a safe route to the new start and flooding along the latter part of the route we have had to cancel the race today. Please accept our sincere apologies we have done everything we possibly can to get this race on, and have been on the course all day yesterday and since 5.00am this morning but again been beaten by the weather. 

It has just not been possible to organise a race to the standard we want to offer you and we are prepared to put anyones safety at risk.

We will contact you individually later. Please pass this message on to anyone else that you know has entered or was intending to do so.

Thank you for your understanding.

Bugger.  Race cancelled.  Really could have done with the extra time in bed.  So Izzy and I went back to bed, a quick text to Nanny to tell her child-sitting was no longer required and that was that.

A nice lazy morning, eventually got to my parents and spent some time with them.  Headed up to Bexleyheath to pick a few odds and ends up, a quick light lunch and then I took Izzy home at 1:30am as she had a birthday party to get to.

So I had the afternoon free.  I'd made the decision early on that I was going to run but having seen some of the Plums had headed off for a 13 mile run that morning, I felt obliged to follow suit and it would be good training...

First half of 2014 complete. I felt destroyed. Probably should have stuck to the planned 10 and certainly not run it at close to PB pace (only 2 mins off). I need to learn to run the longer runs slowly. The average HR is a dead giveaway how much effort that went into this run. Almost 2hrs averaging 160bpm. Ouch.

My legs felt ok through to 10k but the soreness kicked in shortly afterwards.  It was the first time I'd used energy gels on any kind of run too.  I had two with me.  I took one at 6 miles and the other at 10.5 miles.  I was literally running on empty for the last 1.5 miles so god knows how bad I would have felt had I not used the gels.

Generally though, it was a good run.

I know I cant keep that pace up for full marathon distance so any dreams of running a sub 4hr marathon are way out of the window now.  Maybe 4:20-4:30 is more achievable and more realistic.  Got some well deserved stick from some of my Plums on Facebook when I posted up the Garmin data and rightly so.  Paul said he'd have a chat to me on Wednesday about working out a realistic time for the Marathon and then can work backwards to schedule the training from that, something I've yet to do!