Bunbury was a delight! All the runners in the marathon and the half marathon enjoyed terrific weather.
It was coolish at the start - but nothing like Canberra and, as the sun rose further in the East, the temperature warmed quite comfortably.
While my original plan had been to aim for about 3.30 or so as an improvement on the Canberra Marathon time, my final couple of weeks of training had been a little hampered by work commitments, and I didn't feel that I had really put in enough work to shoot for this better time.
So I ran Bunbury with a similar plan to the Canberra marathon. Start out nice and steadily trying to run as comfortably as possible to half way and then reassess. This worked well and my heart rate stayed below 145 to about the 15km mark. I ran through the halfway mark in 1:45:36. Looking at my 1km split times, I was running them a little quicker than Canberra in the first half (10-15 secs faster), but I found the 30-35km section tough. I really slowed up there as my legs tightened up, but just after the 35km drinks station I seemed to recover again, motored up a biggish hill and it was only a few km to the finish. Chip time was 3:43:28.
But what a rapid recovery! I got back to the hotel, had a quick swim in their pool, then showered and headed back to Perth with my lovely wife driving. We stopped off at the 'Centre of the Universe' cafe for a very greasy hamburger and packet of burger rings, before arriving at a friend's place for the night. A few beers and fish & chips for dinner, coupled with the afternoon and the night in my skins and I felt great the next day.
By Tuesday I was even better, and my first run this week was Thursday morning at 5.30AM before I ran a workshop. I found I had to hold myself back!
I'm looking forward to some more faster paced training over the next couple of weeks as I get ready for the Gold Coast marathon. The plan for the Gold Coast is to run it reasonably hard - so about 3:20ish is the target.
