Stop Chasing Your Half Marathon PB Like This

Today's race comes from Hindi.

Hindi is 42.

She's an intermediate runner.

She's been chasing a sub-two-hour half marathon for years, she says.

So her target for this race was 1.59.30. She had a clear pacing strategy.

She thought she had prepared reasonably well, and she went in believing this could be the day.

But on the day, she finished in 2.08.31.

So when you look at the race, there's a couple of things that stand out straight away.

So, Linz, can you take us through her race specifically?

Totally.

And before we even jump into the actual, you know, some of her details and things that she gave us, I think the first thing that stands out is that this is a race that's got a tough second half.

So that is something that you have got to plan for.

And if we look at Hindi's pacing strategy, or those are her splits, and if we combine that with her pacing strategy is that she had a plan of going out at about 9.30 per mile.

which is 555 per kilometer.

And then her plan was to actually get 10 seconds per mile, or 16 seconds per kilometer faster each mile, which is Just to begin with, a very difficult way to run.

So I'm all for a conservative start, saving energy for the second half of the race.

But that's quite, not quite, that is an extremely aggressive progression, which I don't really think falls into the same bracket as a conservative start.

So I think there is some work to be done just on overall strategy.

But this race had 1,400 feet of climbing, which is about 400 meters.

And again, that is quite a lot.

And as I pointed out just now, and if we look at that again, a lot more.

Most of that climbing is actually taking place in the second half of the race.

So just like a really poor choice of pacing strategy.

And you can see from her pacing when we look at it, that it actually started to go south quite early.

So she's actually ended up starting at 9.10.