Pain and suffering

Pain and suffering just got a new definition after today. Mental pain, emotional pain? Those are for wussies. Real men get their pain in the only real form: physical pain. Todays experience in pain originates not from previously mentioned maxillofacial surgeries, but instead from the Helsinki City Run, the half-marathon little sister of the Helsinki City Marathon. Sufficient to say, the time was appalling; 2 hours and 31 minutes. Some people will know that I was targetting 2 hours and 30 minutes, but deep down I was somewhat confident that I could achieve a better time. But disaster struck in many forms and ultimately it was my own stupidity that caused me to get knocked from my 2 hour target down 25%.

First of all, saying that I've neglected my training would be an understatement. This is the primary reason for the headaches lateron. No explanations, I just dropped the ball here. Secondly, my approach to eating properly and getting enough energy right before the run (i.e. today and yesterday) was very appalling and at the starting line I was already cursing for not having had more to drink earlier in the day.

The race was started in three waves, which depended on the target times you had given the organizers. I was in the third wave, more than halfway behind the front. The start was slow due to the amounts of people running. So my first mistake of the run was when I got fed up with the situation and started passing by people while trying to clear room for myself. Silly idea; I ended up starting too fast. At the ten kilometer mark I noticed that I was doing a respectable one hour per kilometer pace, but that was obviously way too fast for me. The problems for me started at around the 13 kilometer mark, slightly before the third watering point. This was when my pace started to drop a bit. At the 16 kilometer mark I hit a wall, just one kilometer before the last watering point. I couldn't help but slow down and walk. I had more or less killed my legs.

Deciding to walk is in no way a shameful thing, in my books at least. But it does bring some new problems. The temperatures were already falling, my legs were burning acid, and I passed the last watering point and drank too many (two) glasses of Gatorade. I didn't feel like running, so I continued to walk with a quick pace. But I was walking for too long, since the coldness hit in and after that even thinking about running was pretty much out of the question. Only half a kilometer before the finish line did I decide to start running. So this more or less destroyed all hopes for a respectable time.

Some other practical issues further helping with the downfall was that for some reason the chest plate of my heartrate monitor wasn't working and I wasn't getting any heartrate levels, so I was feeling with gut instinct, which in my case is pretty much nonexistent. Additionally I wasn't able to spot any rabbits or pacesetters of any sort nearby and I didn't have any sort of method of getting feedback on the pace that I was running, aside from doing basic divisions at every kilometer mark. It is, of course, very debatable whether or not I would've understood that I was going way too fast in the first place, even if I'd had access to some sort of speed information.


So to sum it up, the experience was... Horrible. But teaching, in a way. I'm not sure that I'll even attempt to run a marathon this year, but I was thinking of seeing if there is some other half-marathon later in the summer in which I could participate...