Jenny Blizard - 3rd Lady at Humber Coastal Half Marathon 2023

The plan for the day was to run the half marathon at my target heart rate and pace for York Marathon in October, practicing fuelling/hydration along the way and doing a long warm up and cool down. This was plan A.

Having looked at the course in more detail, observed the windy conditions and also noticed that  drinks were in paper cups we decided on B plan knowing that running at my target heart rate in the windy conditions, no proper drinks stations and an off road section for 2.6 miles would mean I would end up running slower than I wanted and wouldn’t really achieve anything.

Plan B was to do a shorter warm up and cool down and run a bit faster than target marathon pace and pick up towards the end.

We set off as planned with Dave running with me and as soon as 3rd place passed me it was clear that there was a different plan I wasn’t party to! Dave running easy kept “half footing” and I knew he wanted me to run for third! It was starting to get annoying after a while and my thoughts went back to Retford half marathon many moons ago when the same thing happened! I asked him “when did we decide on plan b****y X?”.

At around half way I was in 5th place and was monitoring the gap to make a placing which was 1 minute. I knew that if I ran harder from 10 mile I could still get 3rd. I let Dave know this in less polite terms that I wasn’t going to run hard until 10 miles and that I was going to run for third and thankfully he backed off.

At 10 mile the gap had reduced to 45 seconds for third and then after we turned out of the wind around 10 and 1/4 miles I then just nailed it to the finish and gaining 3rd place just after 11 miles. The time wasn’t particularly fast but I was pleased that I was able to pick the pace up at the end of an half and maintain it for a long period. I averaged 187 HR for over 2.5 miles. Early in the year I couldn’t average this in a 5k or latter half of a 10k which I think shows that the aerobic endurance with all the steady miles had helped. After my marathon I want to (May not say this after!) continue with higher mileage.

 

Thanks to Tape to Tape for putting on a good event. Well done to all who ran from our Blizard Running Community, thanks for reading all! I also thanked Dave eventually!