At the beginning of August I decided that I would target the Great North Run as my main aim with the hope of running a quick enough time to gain me a place on the GB team for the World Half Marathon Championships in October. Training went well and I ran pretty close to my 10k PB just two weeks earlier but for some reason the GNR just didn’t happen for me!
I eventually finished in over 75 minutes, a time which many people would be proud of but not what I wanted or needed. The worst part now was having people coming and congratulating me on my time and position. A lot of these people had themselves ran the race so the last thing I wanted to do was say ‘actually I ran a crap time’ as my time was still over an hour faster than some of their times. I think most people could sense my disappointment but I just smiled and accepted their well wishes.
Since then I have had time to step back and think things through with a clearer head. I’ve chatted things through with the UKa Doctor and one of their coaches and I now think it was a silly mistake of not allowing my body to recover sufficiently after the 10k and then tapering off too much.
After the 10k my legs were feeling a bit bashed up so I gave myself an extra recovery day and did my session on the Wednesday rather than the Tuesday. I still felt pretty tired during the Wednesday session so cut out the final set. By the Saturday I felt more recovered so did a mixed pace tempo run and felt fine. The following week was a taper week so a good opportunity to give the body some extra time to recover and refresh ready for the race. Looking at what I did in that final week I now think that I backed off too much. I went from running 95 miles a week to do about 30/40 including the race.
The race is done now and I can’t go back and change it so it’s now a case of learning from the mistakes and moving on. The race took a lot out of me emotionally and physically and I need to give my body and mind time to recover from that. I’m also not getting any younger and now realise that I need to give myself longer to recover from not only races but hard sessions. It’s taken a bad race to make me realise this but as long as I learn from the mistakes I made in my approach to this race then it’s not a complete waste or failure.
After the race my initial reaction was that it was time for me to hang up my trainers but as the days are going by I know that that is definitely not the case. It’s one race and as I always tell others, one bad race doesn’t make you a bad athlete; it’s how you bounce back which defines you!
My next reaction was to find another half marathon ASAP to do to prove to myself that I can run a fast one. Again with time I now realise that this may not be the best plan. Instead I am having a few weeks of easy running and then will get back into training with the focus of doing a fast 10k in November.