Amsterdam man, 2013

By stoat on October 23, 2013.

Just like 2011 or 2012 but faster! TL;DR: 3:43:06. Just 5 minutes faster and I'll only be an hour slower than Maz. This post is mostly for my records. Transport and accommodation just like before, except I had Miranda with me.

2013-10-20 18.02.58 As you can see, Amsterdam has some exciting architecture.

My GPS track is here, or at least a bit of it is. Turning it on as I went in to the stadium I realised I hadn't bothered to charge up the battery. Oops, though its perhaps nice that I'm getting rather casual about things I'd once have obsessed over. So the track contains the first ~16k, and the last ~4k. The official record is here (oh, but you need my name or 7126, my bib number) and that gets you the splits every 5k. Compare to 2012 (bib 2852) and the obvious difference is that I don't fall off a cliff in the last 12k. This time the splits are 5:10 / 5:11 / 5:12 / 5:18 / 5:20 / 5:20 / 5:23 / 5:29 and then 5:0x to the end. My target is 3:30, which will require 5:00 splits. Perhaps next year.

Having the GPS for the first 16k let me get my pace in, and left me running with a group at about the right speed. So losing the GPS after then didn't matter much, and was actually quite unexpectedly liberating, giving me more time to think about my toenails.

I wasn't too hopeful about this race - I hadn't done much training beforehand, so was mostly hoping to roughly equal my PB of 3:46 set in Brighton this year. However, I did significantly better than that, and also came out of it feeling much better - which probably means I could have run it faster, so perhaps I did lose something from not having the GPS. I did slightly suffer from not knowing what pace to run it at - I settled for ~5:15, which would have got me 3:40, and lost a bit off that in the second half, which is acceptable. In retrospect, I should have pushed 35-40 somewhat harder.

And rowing

Since I'm posting sport (again; I promised not to) I'll point to:

* We won IM2 VIII's at the Boston marathon
* I got my point at Peterborough
* We went up 3 in bumps. Did I mention that before ;-?

Tags
rowing
running

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