Cardiff Half Marathon

Last weekend I ran the Cardiff half marathon for Cardiff Women's Aid along with quite a few other runners, as a group we were raising money for the CWTCH project (Cardiff Women Taking Charge) which aims to raise awareness of domestic abuse in the Cardiff area. I don't normally raise money for charity when running races like this but the charity does really good work and I know that any money raised will actually go to a specific project. Together the group raised well over £2000 so it was definitely a success. 

This was Elisa's first half marathon and she absolutely smashed it, getting a time of 1:57. I'm really impressed with how committed she was to her training plan, and how sensible she's been in building up her mileage. Training was trickier in Canada, but I think running in the heat (I know, not snow?!?), really helped.

I'd planned to race the Bristol half two weeks earlier and just enjoy Cardiff for fun. Unfortunately Bristol  clashed with Ironman Wales which I wanted to go and see so on race morning I was hoping to get a decent time in. The start was a bit hectic, and so I was rushing to drop my bag off when I probably should have been warming up. I managed to fight my way past the crowds to get to the pens. I'd hoped to drop in at the back of the faster group at the 1:45 cutoff aiming for around 1:40 but as I'd signed up with a time of 1:45 I wasn't allowed in that pen due to my bib colour. Note to self, don't be so conservative with my time next year.  So I was at the back of my pen with the 2:00 runners and we were off before I knew it. 

Cardiff is a big race, second biggest in the UK by all accounts and it was definitely more congested than Bristol. I spent the first 4 miles trying to get past people with limited success. I felt like I was running terrible lines and the stop/start speed-up/slow-down wasn't helping my rhythm. At about mile 4 I got stuck with a bunch of people running 8 minute miles, when I really needed to be doing 7:40s and my chances of running under 1:40 had pretty much disappeared. Towards mile 10 my ankle started to ache and I ended up running a couple of slow miles. I managed to drag it back a bit and was hoping to squeeze under 1:45 but my ankle just didn't want to let me sprint. So I was 16 seconds over which is pretty frustrating. I ran close to the same pace for the first half of the Manchester marathon so to not knock any time off is pretty abysmal. Still. Lessons learned. Get to races earlier!

Also, who wants cheese and onion crisps in their post race snack bag :( My milkshake was much more enjoyable!

My mile splits
7:58 
7:45
7:41
7:56
7:51
8:02
8:02
8:03
7:58
8:23
8:27
8:16
7:59
0:48

Watch time:
1:45.16   

Official chip time:
1:45.12