Leeds Half Marathon

First big milestone my journey to next year's London marathon was today - the Leeds Half.

Despite still feeling Thursday's race in my legs, we set off in good spirits at 7.30 for the 30 minute journey into Leeds. We ended up taking a car full (7 of us all together - me, Emma, Ady, Richard, Paul, Jane B and Jacqui), and the car was full of wonderful pre-race chatter. A mix of nervousness, anticipation and excitement.

The conditions were a lot better than I feared. The high winds from the last week had dropped and it stayed dry. Quite humid though (85% the BBC was forecasting).

After pelting out too fast on Thursday, I tried to keep it under control early on - both my speed and HR. A few of us had decided to start in the "fast" pens at the front so it was quite difficult not to get pulled along.

The first half of the race is really quite hilly, with the back half mostly downhill. I din't have my Garmin on, but knew I was pacing at about 6:30 for the first half, and I managed to keep this up, slighly bettering it on the downhills despite getting quite tired.

Ended finishing in 1:24:00, which I was very pleased with. This beat my previous best of 1:27:48 (done in Keyworth Turkey trot of 2004).

Using the Runners World predictor, this forecasts a time for the marathon of 3:02:00. I wouldn't have to improve by too much to start getting a forecasted time of 3 hrs, so at this early stage of my 12 month training plan, it puts me in a good position.