Nasty half marathon attempt

[ridgehiker]

5 weeks ago I bailed out of a 1/2 marathon attempt...my goal was a sub 84 min at a 159 pace.... my pb 85min50secs. My strategy was a steady 201 pace with a short burst (230 metres) at a 156 pace every 1000 metres. Worked well for 14k..legs felt strong, breathing fine, heart rate 153 .... situation quickly unravelled however as my wimpy arms couldn't keep their part of the bargain and at 14800 I packed it in.

In hindsight I realized my previous long rows of 12k were just not long enough and since then I've done a couple of 25k's at 207.

On my next attempt should I retry the "short burst" or does a steady or increasing pace work better. I like the burst as it keeps me engaged and motivated but it likely killed my arms on the attempt.

[johnlvs2run]

I'd use a conservative steady pace and negative split.

Any type of bursts take a lot of energy.

I feel it is better to apply one's energy over the last part of the distance.

[M. Podolsky]

Your heart rate must have climbed during each burst, and then recovered when you eased back to a 2:01 pace. There's a limit to the number of times your heart is willing to do this. I'm not sure if it depends on training, or genetics, or both, but I wonder if this had something to do with it. Your arms probably got tired when your body decided to ration oxygen delivery to the non-essential limbs in order to handle important functions like heart and lung operation. I may be wrong, but asking the heart to recover 20 times is probably asking too much.

I usually do 15km per day, often broken up as a warm up, set piece, and cool down. Instead of programming intervals into the PM3, I'll just select a 10km row as the set piece and do the intervals within that (although more often than not I will just do a steady pace throughout). Last month I got a bit of a surprise when I scored a personal best 10km time using intervals, because I had forgotten my previous PB and wasn't really going for it. The next week I tried again, using negative splits, and beat the interval time by over a minute.

I've done one half marathon. I tried to use the steady pace strategy, but the heart rate started to climb between 12km and 14km, so I backed off to allow a bit of recovery. I was able to resume my target pace after that, and had enough left at the end to pick up the pace by 3 seconds over the last 1km, so I was able to finish with an average pace pretty close to my target. I'll definitely use the steady pace strategy for this month's half marathon.

[andyb2004]

5 weeks ago I bailed out of a 1/2 marathon attempt...my goal was a sub 84 min at a 159 pace.... my pb 85min50secs.

I did a number of HMs recently. Steady pace and speed up towards the end seemed to be effective.
Any sprinting will take its toll as the others say.
Not sure how old your PB is, but 1min 50 is quite a chunk to knock off?

Let us know what happens - good luck.

[ridgehiker]

Thanks for the feedback guys ... much appreciated.

My pb is only 6 months old....I do a fair amount of trail running in late summer thru the fall months and felt the extra conditioning might show up in a sub 84...you're right though, it was too much to expect.

I'll give it another try in a couple of weeks with negative splits and see what happens

[rowmyboat]

I don't think you necessarily need to row a lot of longer rows, 15k is about as much as I row before I attempt a HM. Your effort in rowing the quicker pace every 1k (over 3000m) would indeed have drained you.
As has been mentioned a steady pace would make your target more achievable with neg splits coming in over the last 6k or so. You will I'm sure remember what the last HM row was like? A small improvement on that will still be a PB :-)

[iain]

I'm new to this, but if you had maintained a 2:01 for the whole distance, that would have ben a PB by 44S. If you really believe that sub 1:24 is on, that would leave you quite a lot to do (say 1:58's from 10k to go and 1:56.5 for last 2k), so holding 2:00 for 11k would be better. That would then require 1:59 from 10k to go and 1:57.4 for final 1k.

To achieve the splits for the second half, I always use the projected time, decide how much you expect to speed up at the end (in above example 5S, then from 10k to go accelerate until projected time is 1:24:05). Otherwise the 1S wide instant split and 0.1S average don't tell you whether you are on schedule and 0.5S/500m over 8k is 8S which you might struggle to recoup.

Hope it goes well.

Iain

[ridgehiker]

Thought I'd try the 1/2 marathon again today as everthing seem lined up...pesky chest cold finally gone for good, well rested and legs fresh after a 8k trail run 3 days ago.

Strategy this time was steady and increasing pace and still try for a sub 84 min. (2 min better than my only other 1/2 marathon.... I know its a stretch but sometimes you have to give it a shot!)

1st 5k at 200.5
5k to 10k at 200.0
10k to 15k at 159.5....at this point I felt pretty confident...hr at 151 and feeling little stress
16k at 159
17k to 20k at 158
20k to finish at 155.1

overall resulting in 83:51.5 at 159.2 ehr171

most encouraging however was my average hr .... it dropped from 152 to 148

[badocter]

Congrats and well done. I see you went with slightly negative splits this time which is pretty much how I did my last one too.

My bits to add to this is
-- doing these long ones on rowpro with a few other people helps pass the time, especially in the first half which tends to be boring rather than painful
--Having a c-breeze helped loads (I did mine in the summer though so cooling was an issue).
-- Rather than burst every 1000m which I agree with the others is draining, I made a habit of leaning to the right for a pull and then leaning to the left for a pull every 1k to help keep some circulation going in the bum

[johnlvs2run]

Congratulations.

[DavidA]

Thought I'd try the 1/2 marathon again today as everthing seem lined up...
overall resulting in 83:51.5 at 159.2 ehr171

Congratulations on beating your goal, and on a very good time!

David