Milton Keynes Half Marathon

Friends from Norwich Road Runners did a half marathon in Milton Keynes last year and rated it as a fast technical course.  A couple of us wanted an early  spring half that was fairly local but not that local that we could treat it as a training run and a practice race.  Turning up at a local race, it becomes very difficult to run at a steady pace.  You become too competitive, when you run somewhere new with no familiar races around you shouldn't end up thinking "usually beat them, not letting them beat me". 

Sponsored by Nike+ and attracting over 2,000 entries the Milton Keynes Half seemed to fit the bill.

The Open University was the venue for the race, providing sufficient car parking and a fairly flat technical course.  There are no major hills in Milton Keynes just the odd rise and descent in places to go through under passes and round lake sides.  Pretty similar in effect to Amsterdam, though perhaps a little more undulating. Certainly flatter than the Norwich Half.  The race starts off by following main roads, which are closed to traffic before moving onto the maze of footpaths and cycle-ways that across the city.  This makes for an interesting changing route.  If courses that involve long stretches where all you can see are runners stretched out in front of you for miles are boring then, this is definitely not a boring course.

Timing chip systems were in use to record when you crossed the start line, 5k point, 10k point, 15k point, 20k point and of course the finish.  Signage along the course was good, though a few more pre-the start to get you to the car park would have been handy, but wasn't a problem as I was armed with a map and some local knowledge. Marshalling was very good and there was an impressive police presence manning the closed road section at the start and then at all the road crossing points to ensure that traffic stopped to guarantee the flow of the runners.  One of the things that surprised me along the route was not only the friendliness of the Milton Keynes locals and their willingness to stop to let the runners past, but also the number local residents that had turned out to spectate.

There were water stations at 3miles, 6 miles, 9 miles and 11 miles with Lucazade also available at 6 miles.  Drinks were provided in plastic bottles which are far easier to drink from than cups.  For this I am very grateful.  I'm also pleased to be given the bottle with the top off as it saves me a job.  However the bottles were quite large at 500ml.  That's a pint and puts me in a bit of dilemma.  All I really need is a few swigs at a time and perhaps a little to wear, especially on hot days.  But presented with a bottle of mineral water I don't really want to be wasteful but without a lid I'm not included to run far with the bottle so I end up contributing to the piles of 3/4 full bottles lying on the ground and hoping that there's enough water left at the water station for those slower runners behind.  There is also water, Lucazade and a medal waiting for you at the finish, but no goodie bag - but as some often only contain flyers and adverts that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Though being sponsored by Nike we half expected them to not want to miss out on a branding opportunity.

Milton Keynes is about 100miles Norwich, so quite possible to drive to the event on the morning of the race.  A 10:30am start is quite sociable - early enough to be still make a  pub for lunch afterwards but not that early that you have to get up at silly o-clock.  On this occasion, we'd opted to travel over the day before, get a bit of a nose round, something to eat then the panic to find a late night supermarket to ensure we had food for breakfast.  We stayed at the Premier Inn on the Willen Lake where we had a ground floor room with a lake view.  We had our picnic breakfast at 7.30am to ensure it was well digested before the race.  We then ran back past the hotel at the 4 mile point.  So if you are looking for local, but not too local half marathon to do, then this one in Milton Keynes is certainly one to consider.  If March doesn't fit in with your schedules and July would be better, then there is another that follows a different route.

Okay, so how did I get on?  Well, I really didn't quite know how to pace myself.  Or more to the point, I didn't know quite what pace I should be aiming for.  I'm six weeks away from an Ironman.  Just had a recovery week after three very hard weeks of training and the schedule did say 10-13 miles steady.  In the back of my mind, and perhaps further forward than it should be at this stage in my preparations is the desire to get under 90 minutes for the half, currently PB is 92mins and I also aspire to getting to 3:15 for the marathon as turning 40 later this year means that would give me a good for age place at the London Marathon.  A 90minute half equates to 6:52mpm, 3:15 marathon equates to 7:44mpm and the pace I'll be running the Ironman at will be more like 9mpm.  I know I should have run at 8:40mpm I set off at the same speed as most of those around me, covered the first two miles in 14:13 (I missed the first mile marker), then ran the third in 7:10. Figured at that point that if I wanted to run a PB then I was going to really have to start working hard and didn't feel that good so tried to drop the pace to 7:44.  Didn't quite achieve that either until I developed a stitch at the 10mile marker which I'm putting down to having drunk too much of the 6 mile bottle of Lucazade, but hey, the point of doing lower priority races in training is to learn from such mistakes. 500m from the end I was quite happy to let people go past me - until one of them had a beer belly and I wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of claiming my scalp on a day I was the flying club colours - well, not without a race anyway.  Finishing time was 1:37:14, this time last year that would have been a PB.  Goes to show you the benefit of consistent training an Ironman brings about.  As for the guy with actually quite a small beer belly - left him for dust.

Results

http://www.mkhalf.co.uk

Article by Rob Lines
Page created: 2nd March 2008.