Week 11, 2012

Very decent week with a half-marathon at the end.

Fairly decent week. On Tuesday easy run in the morning and track training in the evening, with intervals. This time for all marathoners (that includes me) Jan served 4 long intervals: 2K each! I did manage to keep an average pace of 4:01 min/km on them and was rather pleased with that. On Thursday I realized I was too tired to do two trainings, especially in the face of the upcoming half-marathon, so instead only did one progressive run: 10K with an average pace of 4:52 min/km and the last 2K at a marathon pace of 4:37 min/km. Then just a very easy jog on Saturday and half-marathon on Sunday...

Concerning the half-marathon let me say this: organization-wise this was the worst race I ever participated in. I mean it. One: it was raining and windy (ok, hard to blame organization for that). Two: there were no km mark, nor water stations (except for 1 at 17K or so, but by that time I decided whatever) -- probably I could have figured that out before the race but to be honest I did not see any information about that. Anyway, I could forgive them those two but it gets worse. Three: the route was not well marked. Twice we took a wrong route and had to turn around. In both cases I only lost few seconds (together with patience for the organization). And if anyone feels funny and wants to make jokes about my orientation skills, let me just say that both times I was following a group in front of me (and they lost more time). Finally the cherry on top of the cake: the route was too short! Both my Polar (recently calibrated) & my GPS registered ~20.3km. When I checked on the map I noticed that we (all) missed a loop of approximately 500m. Finally the organizers announced afterwards that the route was 1K too short. I don't know which of those is true but I'm not going to consider it a race and include it in my race stats... which pisses me off quite a bit, I have to admit.

Concerning my performance; well hard to say. I crossed the finish line at 1:29:32. If I trust my Polar then my expected finish time would be 1:32:57 -- not great. But if the 500m loop is all that we missed, then it'd be closer to 1:31:44 -- within plans. Basically, hard to say. My 5K split times were: 21:29, 21:59, 22:04, 22:32; again, not terribly impressive but I did run plenty of races where I'd loose more by the end. Bottom line: breaking my PB in Paris is not looking great, but should not be impossible either. We'll see...

Comments

jean said…
Adam, dont bother to much about it. You had a very good moment when you skipped a training because you felled tired. And maybe take in account the energy sucking dinner on saturday evening in Diemen. Keep up the good work and Paris will be fine!
Thyra said…
Fully agree with Jan (I know: rare!). What happened to your cross trainings though? They're getting fewer and fewer: this week even none at all!
Strzelo said…
Hi Koper, I love your new technology tables but they are obviously to high-tech. I can not see them on both my work and home computers (both new ones with a lot of software installed).
Adam Koprowski said…
If you mean that annoying message at the top -- that's new and I'll get rid of it soon. If you cannot see them AT ALL; are you by any chance reading my blog on Google Reader? If so, the stats tables are not and will never be visible there -- sorry.

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