So I headed off to Palmerston North again last weekend to do the Palmy Half again. I quite like this course, its quite pretty and runs along the river for most of it and given that I did a PB there last year I was pretty keen to go back and give it another nudge to see what I could do, esp as I had been running well recently.
Saturday afternoon was fun, Pete has a choc lab, Cadbury and his birthday coincides with the Palmy Half so for the second year in a row I got to help take Cadbury to Animates to pick out his birthday presents! Did all the normal race pack pick up stuff that afternoon as well. Al's friend Helen from spin, was doing the 10km with some friends from Massey so kept bumping into her at the airport and at Shoe Clinic when picking up race packs, never saw her on race day tho.
Let's cut the long story short, the half didn't go well. Even in the morning while having breakky I didn't think things were going to go to plan, my legs felt sore and tired and we hadn't even started!! I figured they might come right tho and since I had travelled that far I was definitely going to give it a nudge. The first 5km went fairly well, although I missed the 4km marker so it felt like a really really long km till I realised it was 2km! Was feeling pretty shite by this point so decided to walk the aid station and see how I felt after that. Hmm, things went downhill from there, I didn't seem to have any oomph in my legs and every time I looked at my HRM my HR was in the 170's which is ridiculously high for me and definitely not possible to maintain for anything much longer than 5mins or so. The 10km turn around looked mighty nice and I thought about turning there and just doing 10km but I am a glutton for punishment so I plodded on. By the time I reached 11km I could feel my right calf start to niggle. It had niggled a few times over the last few weeks but a bit of anti-flamme and it was always right as rain the next day. I was wearing my compression socks for the race just in case it flared up (and I wasn't the only one in compression socks, Palmy folk know about the socks as well!) So flare up it did and by km 13 I was hobbling and in a lot of pain and really not enjoying myself, I was one step away from sitting in the gutter and having a good cry! I hobbled on hoping that I would see a St Johns van, but no! I had seen them all morning but when I wanted one there was none around, had I been running with my phone I could have called Pete to come and get me cos he ran an impressive 1.32!! So I was kinda stuck with having to finish, I was quite worried about doing more damage to myself by running funny trying to compensate for my calf but I seem to have come away with just a pulled calf muscle.
So the verdict so far is no running for a minimum of 2 weeks and I am one week into that. Lots of visits to the physio and doing as I am told, which includes aqua-jogging! Blah, 90mins of it yesterday! If I can survive that I can do anything I reckon!!
Ohh and my embarrassingly slow finish time? 2 hours 20, I was quicker than that for the run in the half Ironman last year!! Oh well, I have learnt from this race which is good, sometimes you need a race to go badly so you can learn for next time! What did I learn? Don't mess with routine, have caffeine before the race. Plan, plan, plan, I had no race plan for this race, I looked at it more as a long training run than a race and I need to look at all races as races even if they are just small stepping stones on the way to the big race!!
