Executive summary: 21km, hot, hilly, humid, handle with care.
It's about 16 years since I last ran a marathon, and I'm building up to starting again in mid-February. As part of the build-up, I ran the Glasfit 1/2 marathon yesterday (Sunday 2) as a training run. I'm a slow runner (5 - 6 min/km), and run for pleasure, not medals.
On Monday, my eldest daughter came back from nursery school with a cold, which cleared up aftar a day or two. Not before I caught it from her, and passed it on to the babies before I cleared up in turn. As a result, I was fairly sleep-deprived on Sunday morning, from soothing sick babies. I was also still slightly snotty.
We've had a heat-wave for the past month or more. Saturday afternoon was overcast, and we hoped that we might get some rain to cool things off. Not a bit of it -- instead, a cloud blanket trapped the heat, so that when I got up at 4am, I was sweating. On the start-line at 6, most of the runners seemed to have started sweating already, and about 1km into the race even the raucous social types seemed to have been silenced by the heat.
Tom Cottrell's "Runner's Guide" describes the course as "undulating" for the first 12 km. I suppose that he would describe the Himalayas as "small hills" as well. We went up hills. And up more hills. And up a ridge or two. And another hill. Then it leveled out just before (you guessed it) another hill.
About the only human noises that I could hear was my coughing and hawking to get rid of a week's accumulated phlegm from my chest. This ended around the point that the hills ended, which is when a few people started chatting.
Finally, the hills were over, we hit a long downhill, and then the "flat". I suppose that it was pretty flat, but even the slight ups of the flat section hurt, as I had been worn out by the hills at the start. 16km into the race, I realised that I could break 2 hours if I ran the next 5km at 5min/km (forgetting about that last 100m). I tried, but by 18km found that I needed to run a tad under 5, and by the 19km mark I calculated 4:30/km or thereabouts. I just don't run that fast, but thought that I'd keep going as fast as I could until the finish line, or until I dropped.
Between 19 and 20km is uphill. Not much, but enough to make me think of just packing up for the day. By this time, I had no reserves left. Somehow my feet kept on hitting the road, one ahead of the other, regardless of the fact that my legs were in agony, my guts were distressed, and I was absolutely exhausted.
Somehow I managed to find some reserves that I didn't know I had. The last kay is a fast downhill, curving across the grass down into the stadium, with no embankment to climb. When I finally hit the stadium, with 300m to go, I somehow even managed to speed up slightly. With 150m to go, I had a large "bus" in front of me, and realised that if I passed them, I'd break 2 hours. I dug deep, and managed to sprint past them, to finish in 1:59:30. Then I fell down. I managed to make it through the chute and to some shade on my own, then collapsed in a little heap for a while.
Race organisers usually have a little laugh by marking long kilometers at the end (that's why the first few k's are so much easier than the last ones:-)). The Glasfit has humane organisers -- the last kilometers must have been pretty short.
The 2003 Glasfit 1/2 marathon was not a pleasant race, but it did show me that 21km must still be treated with respect. It also reminded me what marathons are all about -- digging deep when there's nothing left and somehow keeping going. A day later, it has also left me with a feeling of satisfaction, coupled with slight trepidation about the Pick'n'Pay marathon on the 16th. However, this race showed me that, even though I'm aging and decrepid, I am still able to hit a (small) wall and bounce back. Best of all, I'm not even stiff today!
paul