Langdale Half-Marathon

I haven't blogged for about six weeks, as little to report, but this morning was the Langdale half-marathon, so I reckoned that was worth a mention...  As previously blogged, I had knee/calf/ankle problems after the Kirkbride half-marathon.  And the at the start of September I was knocked back a bit by falling over on a training run.  So training for Langdale hasn't been great, but I have been following the plan on the gym treadmill for the last few weeks, and I felt I could give this race a go.  Landale is a stunningly beautiful event, and even the weather was nice, so I enjoyed it a lot!!  But my time was simply awful!!  Two and a quarter hours, at an average pace of 6:21m/km!!  Not exactly great, but there are reasons/excuses... 😁.  The first thing was the slight lack of training that I have just mentioned.  That meant that I had done almost no long runs, which is not brilliant for a half...  But the main reason for the slow pace was the Landale course is very hilly indeed!!  According to my Garmin there were 522m of ascent on this run.  That doesn't sound lots, but it felt like lots!!  Lots of steep hills going both up and down, and very little simply flat.  My knee problems mean that even downhills are problematic for me.  I had to go very slowly down the hills and was overtaken by everyone at those times!!  My knee also means I don't want to walk at all in an event, so I kept running up the hills, which meant overtaking lots of people who were walking,  But running this way means you lose way more time than you gain.  I think even with my knee and the hills, the time is still not good though!  If I look at the Kirkbride half-marathon, my average power was 240w.  My gadgetry says I should be hitting more like 250 or even 260w for a half, but 240 feels about right for me tbh.  But today, the average was 211w.  This is very low, and obviously the power was quite high when running up hills.  But, as said, that was more than eliminated by my lack of power going down hills.  Anyway, enough techie jargon, the bottom line is that I was very, very happy to have done this event, and the time is not so relevant!!  😁