This week was pretty quiet on the training front, in anticipation of the weekends Half Marathon in Mannheim. Monday was 1 hour light bike ride, Tuesday was 50 min gym session. Noted a pain in my Achilles (old reoccurring injury that comes back to haunt me all the time). Lots of knee/quad stretching as my knee hasn't been 100%. Wednesday was 5km run; knee was ok with this. Not perfect, but was good enough for me to decide to run the Mannheim Half. Thursday was run/walk with stretching and using the new "blackroll" self massage thing. This is sore as hell, but works well!
Mannheim Half Marathon - Saturday 12th May 2012
The Mannheim Half and full Marathon is in the evening, so i worked Saturday morning from home, and then went shopping for a new camelback to use in the race. (i know you shouldn't try something new on race day, but it had to be done). The weather was changing all week from rain, to wind, to 34C so i was happy to see that come Saturday lunch time it was sunny, dry and around 18C. That was perfect for me.
The Mannheim race is organized really well and has around 12,000 runners. The start was a bit congested but i got off ok. Looking back though, i could feel the pull on my Achilles right from the start.
Pre race i was hoping to do this race in 1 hour 59 mins and for the first ten km i was keeping a pace of approx 05.45-05.50. But half way through the achilees was getting sore and i needed a toilet stop. After the toilet stop at 13k the achilees was getting more than just uncomfortable, so i decided to pull back the speed so as to avoid any injury. My pace time dropped down to approx 7mins+.
Final time was 2 hours 20 - ten mins slower than the weinstrasse race 3 weeks ago, but the good news is that i am still in one piece and can continue the training for Dublin!
Post race was a good craic - there was a good gang of us having a few beers. Friends had come from Ireland, England and Switzerland. Will need to find another race to put in the diary now!
NOTES:
Total training time for the week: 7 hours and 7 mins
Weigh in: 92.kg
No comments:
Post a Comment