Milano City Marathon
The good news is that I ran a PB (personal best) in this race - I should have since the course was about as flat as a pancake and the weather was almost ideal, lightly overcast and not too cold or windy.
Unfortunately I didn't run as well as I expected. I started off fine but sometime after 30km - I'd say perhaps 33km I started having a problem with my groin and was unable to stride the way I wanted to. As a result I slowed down a lot and instead of reaching my goal of 3h0x I did 03:14:53 gross and 03:14:18 net. That is a minute faster than I ran PRague a year ago but I really should have been about 5 minutes faster.
I ran the firts half in 1:32 so that means I ran the second half in the abysmal time (for me) of 1:42. Well these things happen and the next few races are all going to be trail races and half marathons, so I'm not going to have a chance to improve on this for a while but I hope that on my return to Oki to run the 50km in June I will not suffer from the same problem...
The race itself was pretty well organized with about 7000 participants - I think it was 7000? - some of whome were doing the half marathon. We started out in the sticks at the Rho Fiera and ran in to the middle and then basically did a big loop around before finishing at the Castello Sforza. It was a very pleasant course and we hit most of the tourist attractions in Milan on the way - from the San Siro football stadium to the Duomo. It was pretty well organized too, the start was not particularly chaotic and there were frequent refreshment stops (every 5km). The last two ro three stops (30km and 35km) had energy goo as well as the more standard bananas, raisins, biscuits etc. That definitely helped me but even with goo I couldn't push my legs enough to maintain the desired pace.... Tant pis as they say in France.
Unfortunately I didn't run as well as I expected. I started off fine but sometime after 30km - I'd say perhaps 33km I started having a problem with my groin and was unable to stride the way I wanted to. As a result I slowed down a lot and instead of reaching my goal of 3h0x I did 03:14:53 gross and 03:14:18 net. That is a minute faster than I ran PRague a year ago but I really should have been about 5 minutes faster.
I ran the firts half in 1:32 so that means I ran the second half in the abysmal time (for me) of 1:42. Well these things happen and the next few races are all going to be trail races and half marathons, so I'm not going to have a chance to improve on this for a while but I hope that on my return to Oki to run the 50km in June I will not suffer from the same problem...
The race itself was pretty well organized with about 7000 participants - I think it was 7000? - some of whome were doing the half marathon. We started out in the sticks at the Rho Fiera and ran in to the middle and then basically did a big loop around before finishing at the Castello Sforza. It was a very pleasant course and we hit most of the tourist attractions in Milan on the way - from the San Siro football stadium to the Duomo. It was pretty well organized too, the start was not particularly chaotic and there were frequent refreshment stops (every 5km). The last two ro three stops (30km and 35km) had energy goo as well as the more standard bananas, raisins, biscuits etc. That definitely helped me but even with goo I couldn't push my legs enough to maintain the desired pace.... Tant pis as they say in France.