1:26:31 (sorry, it's been a while)

Yep, that was my time for the Auckland Half, and I'm stoked. It's a fantastic race, and I'm really pleased with the time. It was cool to compete in such a big race, with supporters everywhere.

It was an early start (4:00), so we had enough time to wake up, eat breakfast, and wander down to the ferry terminal. We'd mucked around a bit at Devonport (read - I waited forever to go to the toilet - and luckily there was one roll of paper left), so the start line was rather full. But I found a small gap near the front, and jumped the fence, which was good, because my gun time was only 10 seconds more than my clock time.

The race starts off with a few short but steep hills, and is pretty rolling (with a few larger hills) until you get to the Harbour bridge. My plan was to go out at 1:30 pace (so 4:15 mins a km), but I was going a bit quicker than that (not because I was getting caught up in the race start), and was feeling good, so just kept going. At five k I started picking it up a bit more, and then again at 10k.

The bridge was hard - it's steep from the North Shore side, and has a really steep camber for the first 300m or so. But I set my sights on a guy ahead of me (by that stage I was passing slow marathoners) who was clearly doing the half, and pushed to catch him. I got quite close, but he got a bit further ahead on the way down. I had averaged 4:06 mins/k until the bridge, it got up to 4:10 at one stage, and it took me the rest of the race to get it back down again.

After that, I thought it would be mostly flat - but I was wrong. You don't just run around Westhaven, there is an out and back up a steepish hill, which was a little dispiriting. But I pushed hard, then started pushing harder on the way down. I then found a friend, who was pushing pretty hard, and I ran with him for the last 4k. He was going just that little bit faster than I may have been, which was good, because I was able to hold the pace. I then pushed ahead of him in the last 2 k, and thought I'd gotten away, be he held on.

The final stretch is pretty cool, with people lining both sides for the final 300 - 400 m. I thought my friend was done, but then I heard him coming, and I heard the crowd getting excited, so I started sprinting, as did he, with me pipping him at the line. The last 300m I averaged 2:51 min/k, with a fastest of 1:54 mins/k.

So:

Final time - 1:26:31;
Pace - 4:06 mins/k;
Normalized pace - 4:03 mins/k (while not a flat race, you finish only 3 m higher than you start, and I obviously kept a fairly even pace throughout);
Average HR - 182, max 205 (I'm not sure the max is right - that came when I running downhill early in the race, so I suspect it isn't).

Similar lesson to the Legend - while I paced myself well, I perhaps needed to push a little harder a little earlier. I'll just have to let Kate predict my time again (she said she thought I'd do 1:26:?? to 1:27:?? (perhaps the upper end, but still), and pace myself based on that =)

Here are some fun graphs:

Heart rate (apart from the silly stuff early on, nice even effort, increased steadily at the end):


And pace (across my splits - of which there were 19 - I missed a couple of k's):