Race date: 10.6.2012
Official Finishing Time: 1:27:46 chip time
Official Position: 6/258 (finishers), which puts me in the fastest 2.33%
Race Number: 220

This race report is a bit overdue since I was travelling for three weeks after the race. I’ll keep it brief! We arrived at the tiny town of St. Maries, Idaho the night before the race. It was pouring rain and pretty cold too, not very inviting. Decided to go for long sleeves the next morning and I didn’t regret it!

We picked this race since we were travelling through Idaho anyway, from the West Coast towards Yellowstone, and it looked like a reasonably fast one. The course was flat, but it came as a surprise that most of it was on gravel. I don’t think I lost too much time because of that, but it wasn’t quite ideal. The bigger problem was that after the half way point I was running virtually on my own. The top three were way beyond my reach (all finished in sub 80min) and I couldn’t even make myself catch up with the fourth and the fifth guy, who were about a minute and a half ahead of me.

Preparing for the race with Elizabeth

Well, my time wasn’t so bad in the end, given that my training has been far from ideal during the spring. But it’s clear that I’m far from where I wanted to be this time of the year. The Berlin marathon is only three months away, and I even set a sub 80min half marathon as my ambitious goal for the year. That’s unlikely to happen, but I’d be happy to just match last year’s performance at the moment (my PB for the half stands at 1:25:15).

Elizabeth ran a respectable 1:45:37 — a PB by some margin — and finished 39th overall.

I did manage a decent position in this race at any rate, and in fact I was the first in my age group. This was only the second time that the race has been organized, and it’s a small race to begin with, so the level wasn’t very high. I had some hopes of a podium finish beforehand, but as it turned out fourth place would’ve been the best I could’ve possibly managed. I was slowing down badly towards the end, as is evident from the splits below. The first 5k were nicely within target pace (4min/km), but by 10k I had dropped slightly below and there was no way to keep it up after that.

Splits (elapsed time):
5k 19:46.21
10k 20:44.29 (40:30.50)
15k 21:12.23 (1:01:42.73)
20k 21:17.17 (1:22:59.90)
Total: 21,18k in 1:27:59.1

Official results here.
Garmin data here.

I’ve got another half marathon coming up on July 28th in Finland, it’s the Heinola half-marathon which I ran in 1:25:55 last year. The course is pretty fast and I’ll give it all I’ve got, but my eyes are already on the Berlin marathon, so I’m training with Berlin in mind rather than the half. Still, I’d love to match last year’s performance, or even sneak in a PB. We’ll see…