Manchester Half Marathon!!

Today was the day!  The half marathon that I had been training for, for the last few months!  The event is just superb!!  An easy tram to get close to the start,  And then a flat course with loads of support the whole way round!!  Just fabulous!!  I was wearing my Vegan Runners t-shirt and got just heaps of support personally the whole way!!  Loved the whole event, and the Manchester Evening News (a newspaper) even has a picture of me running!!  Picture number 20 out of 45, so not exactly famous, but funny!!

My idea before the race was that I should be somewhere between 1:50:00 and 1:55:00.  Not exactly quick, but decent enough!  However I didn't mind if it was over 2 hours - the main goal was simply to finish!!  But on the day, with the good weather, and good training and feeling fine, I thought I should be under 1:50:00 - maybe even close to 1:45:00.  It wasn't to be - my official time was 1:52:34 which is bang on what I expected, but slower than I hoped!!

Despite an average time, I loved the race!!  So much support, and everyone very friendly and the whole race is organised brilliantly!!  I wanna do this half-marathon every year I think!!!  I started quite slowly, due to the number of people.  But my worry was starting too quickly and burning out, so I was very happy with that and didn't risk lots of overtaking etc!  After one or two km I moved to a more standard 'comfortable' pace of about 5:12m/km.  That would have been cool if I could have kept that going, but I got a bit slower as the race progressed.  But I could go quickly at the very end , so I had more in the tank, I could have gone faster earlier!!  But no matter - it was awesome!!

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