Phildelphia Distance Run

Yesterday I completed my second half marathon, contrary to popular belief, these things don't get easier the more you do them. Well, to be honest, it was going rather well to a point, but I'll get to that in a minute...

Firstly let me go off on PennDOT, who decided that Saturdays are the ideal time to cut interstate 95 N, the major North South artery on the East coast from 3 lanes down to 1 while they do road repairs. Of course, I knew nothing about this until I crossed the state line coming out of Delaware. With 4 hours to go until the end of packet pick up, and a mere 25 miles to go, how could I fail? 1 hour later, with 23 miles to go, I started to get concerned...

Thanks to my wonderful Blackberry (more on this later) I saw a way around the traffic, if I could only get off at the next exit... Slowly, but surely, I made my way over, and traveled through Chester and Ridley Park at what seemed like breakneck speeds, well ok it was about 25mph, but after the crawl of the previous hour...

Finally I made it to the hotel, a quick run to the convention center saw me arrive an hour before it closed.

The next morning I was up at the starting gate, waiting for the horn to sound. At 7.50 am, off it went. The first 5k was faster than my fastest 5k time (no wonder really, given that I've only run one 5k, and that was back when I was starting training). My 10k time was faster than my best 10k, and my 7 mile time was exactly equal to that of my previous 1/2 marathon 2 weeks ago. As long as I kept this pace up I was going to finish in under 2 hours, and probably around 1h 54m. By mile 9, I was still doing well, but I started to feel some twinges in my left leg, I carried on. By mile 10, my left leg was really starting to hurt, I didn't want to slow down to a walk, as it's hard to restart once you do so, but soon I had no choice. At the 11 mile marker, I was still on for a sub-2 hour race, as long as I paced myself at 10 minute miles, but the leg continued to get worse. It got to the point where I couldn't even jog. Switching my knee brace from my right leg to the left one helped somewhat, and I continued to limp / half jog the rest of the way. I reached the finish line in a time of 2 hours, 3 minutes and 1 second. Not great, but I finished, and it was still a personal best, so I'm happy with it.


As for the leg, apparently it was a pull between my quads and my knee that was causing the pain, it's a lot better today, and we'll see how it goes when I do my next short run tomorrow night...

Oh, and as for the Blackberry, it was in my bag when I left the event, but between there and the taxi back to the hotel, it was gone... Thankfully I'd taken out the insurance plan, so I'll have a new one waiting for me at the office tomorrow.