Apologies for blog lag but it’s been a busy few days, yada yada.
Two hours, four minutes and some seconds. I don’t have a terribly accurate time as the official time (two hours 9 mins) is way out. We got stuck in the queue for the loos at the start (more loos please) and ended up starting about 6 minutes after the gun (we ran 5 minutes to catch up with the broom car). The ipod time is also not quite accurate as I started it a bit before the line in the rush to get started. So I am saying 2 hours 4 minutes which makes it 5 minutes quicker than Hangzhou. We were trying to average 5:45 per kilometre to make it under 2 hours but didn’t quite achieve it. I’m not too worried about that as it is only three weeks since Hangzhou and the training was pretty scant in between (specifically a 6k and two 10ks, all in the last week).
The race was good, the course itself is not terribly pretty but it is fantastic to be running in such an amazing city and they police / marshals did a good job keeping the route open for us, we had at least a lane all the way round the half course which was better than Hangzhou. My only other issue was that I actually missed one water stop as they weren’t terribly obvious when you are tearing along at 10km/hour. The weather was kind to us which was a blessing after it had tipped it down on us through over 3 hours of searching for safety pins (required to attach number to shirt) on Saturday.
Such a big event meant that there was quite a buzz throughout the race and particularly at the finish line. I enjoyed the race, I enjoyed Hangzhou because it was such a nice route and my first race but in terms of how I felt throughout the race Shanghai was probably better. I seemed to spend longer comfortably chugging along at my pace not battling with myself.
Next one’s got to be a full marathon.
[Flickr set – Shanghai Half 2006]
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