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You are here: Home / Archives for melbourne marathon festival

melbourne marathon festival

Ready to Fail, Ready to Fly

Zoey · November 14, 2017 · 1 Comment

My favourite thing about this photo is that the pain of those last hard kilometres are over even though I haven’t crossed the line yet, because I know that I’ve already finished. It’s done.

The hardest thing about any race is the pacing. You’d think it would be the training. You’d think it would be the 954.8km I ran in the thirteen weeks that led up to that moment. You’d think it would be all those hard sessions which seemed just beyond my ability at the time, which I (mostly) managed to complete. You’d think it would be the body maintenance I had to do in the first month while I was coping with the adjustment to the distance. Or you might think it was the time when I set my alarm for 3:30am three times a week to get my distance in. But it wasn’t. It was the pacing.

Because pacing isn’t about discipline, it’s about how fast you think you can go.

The risk you take is that if you are overly-aggressive with pacing and rate your ability too highly, you can fall apart at the end. And if you don’t back yourself enough you can end up finishing strong but with a race that doesn’t truly represent what you are capable of. And I was willing to fail, really fail. I just wanted to know what I was capable of. Even if that meant blowing up in the middle. Even if it meant dragging myself through the last 8km. That would be a reasonable sacrifice for me to know what I could do, without hedging my bets on something safe.

As great as the tune up race had been a few weeks earlier, it had given me very little information to go on. I had more or less made my pacing for the day. But due to a less than ideal lead up, it gave me no indication that I was capable of anything more than the 1:46:30 I ran at the Gold Coast.

The safe bet would have been to pace for a 1:44 half marathon. A decent improvement on what I’d already done. Especially taking into account that Melbourne is not pancake flat like the Gold Coast and it can tend to be a bit warmer. But I just felt like I had more. And deep down 1:40 was my number. And I decided to go for it. If I thought about averaging 4:44 pace for 21km it was terrifying. Because frankly, it felt hard enough doing that for 6km. But you just have to trust that the training is one thing and a race is something else. When you need to dig deep, you will find another level. I took comfort in the predictor workouts I’d done in the last few weeks which did indicate I was capable of it, even if I didn’t really think I could do it.

So following my trusty negative split strategy for half marathons this was my goal for the race:

3km Warm Up @ 4:54 pace

5km @ 4:46 pace

5km @ 4:44 pace

5km @ 4:41 pace

3km @ 4:34.

I tried not to look at it too hard, because it looked over-ambitious.

What I did on the day was 3km @ 4:53 pace, 5km @ 4:47, 5km @ 4:43, 5km @ 4:38, 3km @ 4:38.

I was excited when I got to the last 3km and I couldn’t speed up, because I knew I had reached the entirety of what I could do that day, and that filled me with a kind of joy, that no time ever could. I knew how fast I could go. And I learnt that you usually have a whole lot more than you ever think you do.

Rachel’s Race Report

OperationMove · October 24, 2014 · 4 Comments

rach-kate-jo

The weekend before last I travelled from Brisbane down to Melbourne to do the 10k event at the Melbourne Marathon Festival. I was a little nervous but mostly excited because not only was I going to run in Melbourne I was going to meet a number of the Operation Move team in person for the first time.

I originally signed up for the MMF last year and was going to do the half marathon with a few of the other Operation Movers. It was going to be our first half marathon. However early this year I injured my ankle and knowing I needed to train for the half and I hadn’t run / walked more than 5k before I started to panic about it. My mental health takes priority so I decided to take that pressure off and switch to the 10k. At the time I was going to be doing it on my own but that didn’t matter – my main reason for going to Melbourne was to meet people, to meet the team.

As it turned out another couple of people injured themselves in the months leading up to the MMF and also switched to the 10k. So instead of doing the run by myself I got to spend that 10k with a couple of absolutely wonderful women – thank you Jo and Kate! One of my team mates on the run was still nursing a knee injury and so we ended up walking about 7k of the distance but we stuck together and I know I had a better time than I would have if I’d decided to take off and run by myself.

One of the advantages of us doing the 10k was that we could then be at the finish line for the half marathon and cheer on the lovely ladies doing that event. It was fantastic – so exciting looking out for your team and cheering their hard work and achievement. Then we headed over to the marathon finish line to look out for our marathon women. It was amazing when we saw them – I cannot imagine running for that amount of time and we all cheered so loudly for them. I had to head off to my hotel soon after they crossed the finish line and as I was saying goodbye and hugging everyone there may have been a few happy emo tears shed.

Thank you Operation Move for not only an amazing weekend but for getting me to the point where I have now completed 2 x 10k events and started thinking that a half marathon is achievable.

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