Jedburgh Half-Marathon

I wasn't intending to run another race this year after the Loch Ness Marathon (on 2nd October), but my recovery from the marathon went much more quickly and smoothly than expected, to the point where my training runs were going about as well as I can remember (like hitting an average pace of 7.18/mile for an 8-miler less than two weeks after the race, and getting through 10 miles in less than 1:15 the following week, without feeling like I was pushing particularly hard on either run). While running another race not long after the marathon was a risk, I didn't want to let this sort of form slip away without getting something tangible out of it. If my legs hadn't recovered from the marathon, there was always the option of using the race to do a long training run - would be easy enough to make that call after a few miles, if I wasn't feeling up to a 100% race effort.

The best option for adding another race this year ended up being Jedburgh - close enough to drive to (it's about an hour away from home for me), a choice of 10k or half-marathon, and a suitable date (far enough after the marathon to give me a chance to recover, but not so late in the year for there to be a significant risk of cold weather screwing things up). Add in good reports from several people at the running club I'm a member of, and it became an obvious choice - the half-marathon made more sense to me, as I have a decent endurance base, but haven't done much in the way of speedwork recently.

I ended up getting a lift to the race with several other members of the club - think that we ended up with around a dozen runners in the half-marathon, including two people who cycled the 45 miles from Edinburgh to Jedburgh for the race, then got back on their bikes for the return journey afterwards - which made the journey down a good bit more enjoyable than it would have been if I had been driving on my own. We got there in plenty of time, and picked up our race numbers and chips (then had the fun of working out how the best way to attach the timing chip (the 3cm x 5cm plastic rectangle with four holes to use for lacing it to your shoe) - I use the elastic Lock Laces, which aren't the easiest things to untie...) A bit of warming up and stretching followed, and then off to the start.

Things weren't particularly organised at the start - in particular, the PA system was close to inaudible - so it was a bit of a shock when the starting gun went off! I got over the surprise and into my running pretty quickly, though, and settled down to the challenge ahead.

The route for the half-marathon is pretty much an out-and-back - for practical reasons, it uses a slightly different route on the first few miles compared to the last stretch (the last couple of miles use the pavement beside the main road through the town, and it would cause too many problems to shut this road down completely for a couple of hours). It's not the flattest area, though, and there are quite a few little climbs and descents along the way - there is a reasonable amount of flat road to run on too, though, so it's a nice mix. The big challenge for the day wasn't the route, however - while we had been lucky with the weather in some ways (in that it was dry and the temperature was in the mid-50s with a bit of watery sunshine), the wind (out of the south-west) was going to make the second half of the race pretty tough...

I got caught up a little bit in the initial rush away from the start, but managed to catch myself before falling into the trap of going too fast over the first few miles (I did a bit of talking to myself on this stretch - things like 'it's my race' and 'keep to your pace' were repeated a few times...) The first three miles went through Jedburgh, then onto a reasonably wide path - enough space for four runners abreast and a decent surface for running on, but with a few ups and downs. While it's one of the bigger 'local' races, that only means that there were around 1,000 runners between the 10k and the half-marathon - it was a little crowded in the first half-mile, but the runners soon spread out.

Once we got off the path and onto a wider road, the route flattened out - while I was getting into a nice rhythm and stride pattern (I tend to run by feel to some extent - the 'feel' for today was 'feel like you're stretching out just a little bit more on each stride than you would on a general aerobic training run'), I didn't feel all that good for a little bit. The heart rate numbers on my Garmin looked decent, though (was trying for mid-160s on the early miles, easing up into the high-160s in the second half, and seeing how I felt when I got to 9 or 10 miles), and I managed to work my way through the bad patch.

After being passed by quite a few people early on, the race had settled down, and I was starting to hold my position and pass the occasional person as we headed towards the loop at the far end of the course. The leaders passed by at about 6 miles (they were just past 7.5 miles at that point), just before I started the loop - there was a tough little climb as we left the main road, but I managed to get through it reasonably comfortably.

As expected, the wind was definitely an issue on the way back towards Jedburgh - while there was some shelter by the side of the road (in the form of trees and hedges), it didn't do too much to deflect the wind for the most part. This was probably the best part of my race - just thought 'all I can do is maintain my effort and keep the legs moving - it's not going to be easy for anyone', and kept working. I made a little mistake at the water station at around 8 miles - tried to pick up a bottle and missed - but I didn't let it affect my race, and was able to get by until the last water station just after 10 miles.

I had a pretty good idea of what to expect in the last few miles, as we had driven in on that road - a tough stretch of around half a mile of uphill running, followed by a bit of downhill on the other side, then a few ups and downs before the finish. The uphill section was just as tough as it had looked in the car - not particularly steep, but a constant upwards slope into the wind - but I managed to survive, then stretched the legs out on the downhill section that followed. I didn't have a lot left in my legs at this point, though, and it was an effort to keep things going over the last couple of miles. The distance markers kept on passing by, though, and I turned the last corner to see the arch at the finish. The time on the clock at that point was both gratifying and disappointing at the same time - my first view of the clock was at 1:30.05 or so, suggesting that I was about to finish off a significant PR, but that I had just missed out on going sub-1:30. (I stopped my Garmin at 1:30.12 - the official results are out already (a very efficient job by the organisers), and those show me as being 51st over the line (of 527 finishers) with a gun time of 1:30.17, and 52nd on chip time at 1:30.10, a PR of over four and a half minutes (on 1:34.45 in my last half-marathon, at the Great Scottish Run in Glasgow two years ago).

My clubmates also had good runs for the most part, including the guy who was our driver for the day (I had passed him at about 8 miles, but he kept things going well enough to come in less than a minute behind me) - it'll be interesting to see the report on the club website in the next few days...

The profile of the course and my splits for the race are below:





I deliberately have my Garmin set up for races to not give me any information about splits or how fast I'm running - all I can see is the current distance and my heart rate. The splits did come as a bit of a surprise, though - didn't expect them to be quite as consistent. There's a bit of a slowdown in the second half, but this was definitely not a day for negative splits, with the majority of the second half of the race being into a pretty strong wind. I'm definitely happy with the race that I ran, though - felt that I got the effort level right, and didn't leave much (if anything) out there - so it's a good way to finish my racing for the year.

Given the wind and hill at the end, it sounds like you ran a great race Martin. Congrats on the PR! Sub 1:30 is around the corner, maybe even before the end of the year.

Good job, Martin - that was a cruel place to have a big hill towards the end there! Those were indeed good running splits - if you didn't leave anything out there, then I would say you ran the perfect race for the conditions and the day. Excellent!!!

Excellent job on that PR Martin! It has to be especially gratifying knowing that it was hilly and you still had such a big PR.

Diego wrote:Given the wind and hill at the end, it sounds like you ran a great race Martin. Congrats on the PR! Sub 1:30 is around the corner, maybe even before the end of the year.

Thanks Jim - was hard work in the second half, but definitely a good feeling at the end of the race. I suspect that I'm done with racing for the year, though, as there aren't many road races round these parts until the spring.

John Kilpatrick wrote:Good job, Martin - that was a cruel place to have a big hill towards the end there! Those were indeed good running splits - if you didn't leave anything out there, then I would say you ran the perfect race for the conditions and the day. Excellent!!!

Thanks John - I'm sure that a lot of runners were thinking very similar thoughts at about 10.5 miles! It was inevitable that there were going to be some hills, though - there's quite a bit of up and down in any Borders landscape... I suspect that doing this half only four weeks after a marathon was probably part of the reason for not having anything more left at the end, but it is a good sign that I got the early part of the race just about right.

Jim Lentz wrote:Excellent job on that PR Martin! It has to be especially gratifying knowing that it was hilly and you still had such a big PR.

Thanks Jim - my half PR was a bit soft (I managed to get within a minute of it on the second half of the London Marathon last year!), but it's still a good feeling to go out for a race and finish feeling like I've done everything I can to get me to the finish in the best time I could manage on the day.

A link to some pictures has been posted at the race website - this is the only one I've found of me (451, in the foreground - if I remember correctly, this was at around 9.5 miles):

Great job with the PR on that course.