galaharriers.com

The route was very scenic and hilly in parts, though a lot of it seemed to be downhill. It started between Fort Augustus and Foyers and follows Loch Ness on the south shoreline into the city, finishing at the Queen’s Park Stadium. 1402 runners completed the full marathon and 2112 runners completed the 10km. There was also a 5km fun run.

I came to Inverness to take part in the Loch Ness Marathon expecting myself to run five to ten minutes quicker than my last marathon. I did so because I knew that I had it in me and that my confidence was high going into it. Anything less would have been a disappointment. When it’s your 21st marathon finishing isn’t an end in itself, a finish is assumed before the starting gun. I wanted a faster time. I was therefore under some amount of pressure from myself to produce the goods and pull out a rabbit from my hat. I wanted a marked improvement on my previous eight marathons during which I had laboured to get a time, each one being ran in between 4 hours 30 minutes and 4 hours 53 minutes. The first four miles went to plan; I was making quick progress and my asthma seemed to be manageable. Then going up a steep hill it started to get quite heavy and I was forced to stop and take my inhaler. The next two miles I ran very conservatively, making sure that I began to grasp control of my breathing. With my experience I knew that I could do this and recover later on to run a good marathon. I gained control from about ten miles onwards and began running twenty seconds per mile quicker than I had been when I was holding back for my breathing. I reached the thirteen mile marker five minutes ahead of schedule and knew then that I would run a season’s best, the fourth in a row. Unlike in my previous three marathons, I concentrated on each mile marker, timing myself between them and upping the pace if I found myself doing a slow one. It was all about time management in the second half of the marathon, keeping a close eye on my mile splits and not allowing them to become too slow. Tiredness does creep in during a marathon, and having already posted enough miles which were within the pace that I had set for them beforehand, I knew that I could afford some slow miles if I needed them. I seemed to hit the wall early at sixteen miles, so I started to take my glucose earlier than I usually do – I usually wait until mile eighteen or nineteen – knowing that I was probably running low on sugar levels. The inevitable surge came at mile eighteen and this lasted up until around mile twenty-three, by which time I realised that I was not only five to ten minutes inside my previous marathon’s time, but well inside it. At first I thought that I was on target for four hours twenty – it’s difficult to do maths in your head towards the end of a marathon – but another runner told me that they had been aiming for four hours fifteen and would be just outside that. I then remembered some of the times of my previous marathons, and four hours seventeen seemed to stick in my head as a target time (it turns out that that was the time I did at London back in 2004 but I couldn’t remember which race and when off the top of my head) – with the stadium in sight for a moment I thought that if I sprinted that I could get just inside four hours sixteen, but firstly, the distance left was longer than I thought (from the 26 mile marker to the finish is always a long quarter of a mile it seems), and secondly, my legs didn’t have a sprint in them anyway. An official time of 4:16:09, nearly a quarter of an hour inside my previous marathon’s time (Helsinki, August) and nearly half an hour inside my first marathon of the year’s time (Rome, March). I have now surpassed my 2003 personal record of four marathons in a single year with five, soon to be six. My next one is going to be Hastings, which is a one-off marathon to mark the centinery of their first marathon, which was held back in 1908 just after the London Olympics.

Richard’s 2008 marathons: Rome City Marathon, March (4:45:54), Isle of Lewis Marathon, May (4:39:10), Isle of Harris Marathon, May (4:33:39), Helsinki City Marathon, August (4:30:56), Loch Ness Marathon, October (4:16:09).

Helsinki Marathon, August 16th 2008

This being my twentieth marathon, I had long wanted to do something a bit special for it instead of doing just another nearby marathon, and eventually I chose Helsinki as the destination for it. Due to it being August it had to be run in a relatively cool climate, and I had long fancied visiting Scandinavia. The event was very well organised and the Helsinki Marathon is the second largest event in the region in terms of participation, after Stockholm. This was to be my fourth marathon of 2008, equalling my four marathons of 2003. I ran the Rome City Marathon back in March and the Isle of Lewis and Isle of Harris marathons back in June. My asthma had been bad during the week leading to the run and I began to have doubts whether I could do it. I flew to Finland and decided to spend a few days above the Arctic Circle to think about my running and whether it would be wise to at least walk some of it. I was feeling very disappointed at the prospect of not running in the marathon, but the clean air of northern Finland allowed my lungs to make a quick recovery back to normal levels for me. I stayed at the Olympic Stadium Hostel for the duration of my stay in Helsinki, which was very convenient because the race started just outside the stadium and finished on the track inside it. I decided that I would at least start the marathon with a view of pulling out if I experienced difficulty in breathing. The race started at three o’ clock in the afternoon. With Finland being at such northerly latitude, the light of day would last well into the late evening and therefore a dawn start was not necessary there for the run. I started the marathon much more conservatively than my other marathons this year and I think this helped me to find a comfortable steady breathing pattern. My endurance and fitness were not what was at question during the run, but my breathing. Running several marathons in a single year can have a number of effects I have discovered; it can lead to fatigue as it did with me back in 2003 when the third and fourth marathons were markedly slower than the first two, or as during this year, they can be momentum building. I finished nearly three minutes quicker than my last marathon on the Isle of Harris, and therefore I have now run five marathons in succession in which I have improved upon the time of the previous marathon. Such momentum is a great confidence booster. I am comfortable with the distance, even though after twenty, I’m the first person to admit that they don’t get any easier, and also I am better able to judge the distance, meaning that I can run a more evenly paced marathon. The run itself was wet – in fact the only day of rain that I experienced during my holiday there. Although it was difficult to see far in the distance, there were some stunning views of the Baltic Sea, and the support on the sides of the road were enthusiastic and welcoming. I’m looking forward to my final two marathons of 2008, the Loch Ness Marathon on October 5th and the Hastings Marathon (a one off to celebrate the centenary year of the Hastings Half, and in which there are still entries available) and I hope again to make improvements in each. I have some nice photos of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium and also of a statue of Paavo Nurmi which I’ll post soon.

Posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 7:31 am and is filed under Race Reports.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.