Alloa Half Marathon

By Dom Sharkey

31/03/19

It was an absolutely perfect morning for running in Alloa – absolutely no wind to speak of, sunny but quite cold at the start, which I definitely prefer to being too warm. I managed a small warm-up of around 1km just to get my legs moving, then weaved my way through the crowded start pen to get up to the 2nd row of starters.

Saw a few familiar faces on the startline which gave me a few targets in my mind of folk I wanted to beat, but I know I am much better running my own race - especially over this distance - so decided to try my best to ignore them.

Race started and all of a sudden I got swamped from all sides as about 60 folk over took me in the first 100m as I thought I’ve either turned up to the wrong race or everyone is starting waaay too fast. My watch was saying I was just above my target pace, having planned to start cautiously, so I have no idea why everyone else was running so quickly. After the congested start I found a bit of space and settled into my own rhythm, aiming for about 3:48/km pace for the first 10km. I found myself gravitating towards this pace, even slightly faster, and feeling quite comfortable – before I really knew it I looked at the watch and we were 7km down. The course was undulating quite nicely – nothing really worth calling a hill, but I quite enjoyed the rolling roads as it helped to have the crest of the rise to aim for, then to have a slight downhill to gain a bit of momentum again, and this helped me keep the pace quite strong. Once we hit the village of Menstrie and had a long straight section of road for several miles ahead I began to consciously nudge the pace up a bit, and gradually caught and worked my way past a good few groups of runners. I remember seeing 13km on my watch and thinking, ‘This is starting to get a bit uncomfortable now’ but I felt committed to the pace and was either going to do or die.

Around the 16km/10mile mark we then turned back off the road and were heading back into Alloa town. There was a short section on a cycle path which suddenly came to a fork, with a left and right option, and a cycle path sign saying Alloa pointing right with no marshall or arrows, so my group had to stop for a few seconds and work out what to do. All of us being keen to keep moving decided to go right and headed down for about a minute before hearing a shout that we were going to wrong way!! Several very loud expletives were uttered, then I had another minute to run back to the junction and go the correct way. My thoughts initially were - that’s my race over, the PB is gone now, let’s just jog to the finish. But I decided I came here to run as hard as I can so I’m doing it nonetheless. And if anything the surge of anger I had after this might well have helped a bit too, as I then spent the rest of the race catching all the people who I’d overtaken previously.

When my watch hit 21.1km I took a mental note of 1:18:15, then had another 600m or so to run, and was really hanging on for dear life by this stage. As I felt like I was pushing harder and harder to a sprint, my strava data shows I was barely maintaining the same pace, and had the race been much further I would have started to slow a lot. But crossed the line in 1:20:22 – which actually would have been a PB anyway – but I’m taking my real time of 1:18:15 for the half marathon distance run, and am very happy with that!