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That photo was the last time I felt okay.
In a previous paid subscriber post, I talked about my return to running and my goal of doing a sub 2-hour half marathon on September 23. Well, I did it, and that sweaty pic is me right after crossing the finish line. It was actually 400m shy of a half marathon, according to my watch, but my time was 1:53:42. Had I run the extra 400m my time would have been right around 1:56.
When I trained for my first marathon, which was in Los Angeles in 2012, I developed a cruising speed of 5:30 per kilometer to get under four hours. I finished in 3:52:11, which was pretty much exactly the 5:30 pace. My 10K splits were all within 15 seconds of each other. For this half marathon it didn’t go quite like that. At the 14km mark I was ahead of schedule; my average pace was 5:21.
So I said fuck it ima slow down a little.
I could have finished the race maybe three minutes faster, but I knew I had a good buffer and that I was well on schedule to hit my goal, so for the last seven kilometers I eased the pace a bit and ended up finishing right on my desired schedule. It was the responsible adult thing to do because shaving those three minutes would have been painful. Go me.
And yet, that evening, everything went to shit anyway.
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