My wife and I decided to make a weekend of the event, so we booked a B&B in Bideford, which was literally less than 2-minutes from the start line. I'm not trying to put Bideford down as it looks a lovely place, but after a quick wander around the town it became apparent I wasn't going to get a decent evening meal so we jumped in the car and drove to the nearby Barnstaple where I knew they had a Prezzo restaurant and I continued my carb loading there.
On the morning of the race, we had breakfast (shredded wheat, coffee and toast) and as the owner of the B&B was also running the event we had quite a long chat about the funny little ways each of us has when it comes to running. Unfortunately, I saw the owner at about mile 9 and he was limping in the wrong direction. I later found out that he had hurt his knee so had to pull out.
I was incredibly nervous in the morning, but got to the start line in good shape and I was feeling fairly confident. The disappointment I had in Exeter was still clear in my mind and I had a strategy which was to really try and negative-split the race to see if I could sneak under the 1:45 target. I wrote after the Exeter Half the following:
I must stick to my plan, get to half way more or less on target (not under target) and reassess how I am feeling at that point.I'm really pleased to say that I stuck really well to this plan. I knew I had to average under 8 min/mile to get under 1:45 and I wanted to run the second half faster the first half. I purposefully held back a bit in the first half of the event and I got through mile 7 in 57min 03sec. I found that I was feeling really good so from there I purposefully tried to step it up and I did it quite comfortably. From mile 7, no other runner overtook me and I must have overtaken between 50 and 100 people myself. At mile 9 I was on target for 1:45 and I'm delighted to say that I managed 1:42:02, so which ever way I look at that it's a strong PB....5mins+ quicker that my last effort at Exeter (which was also a PB).
The splits are below:
| Split | Time | Cumulative Time |
| 1 | 08:25.0 | 00:08:25.0 |
| 2 | 08:04.8 | 00:16:29.8 |
| 3 | 08:20.1 | 00:24:49.9 |
| 4 | 07:57.2 | 00:32:47.1 |
| 5 | 08:06.5 | 00:40:53.6 |
| 6 | 08:07.2 | 00:49:00.8 |
| 7 | 08:02.6 | 00:57:03.4 |
| 8 | 07:27.5 | 01:04:30.9 |
| 9 | 07:24.0 | 01:11:54.9 |
| 10 | 07:21.8 | 01:19:16.7 |
| 11 | 07:18.7 | 01:26:35.4 |
| 12 | 07:26.1 | 01:34:01.5 |
| 13 | 07:18.1 | 01:41:19.6 |
| 14 | 00:45.0 | 01:42:04.6 |
| Summary | 01:42:04.5 |
Looking at them is really interesting. You can see that for the first 7 miles all but one of the miles was over 8 min/mile, and from then onwards I didn't go above 07:30. This is a huge negative split, where I ran the second half of the race a full 4 minutes quicker that the first half. I'm not actually sure if this is the best way to do it, but I do know for sure that I feel a lot better finishing strong as opposed to what happened in Exeter.
So, all in a great race. There are no more halfs for me until June, so now the attention firmly turns to building up the LSRs for the marathon in May.
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