This was my first visit to Torrevieja, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be a town full of English and German ex-pats, with a bunch of English restaurants and shops, and hotel after hotel on the seafront. It turned out to be something completely different, at least the part of the town I saw. It was a miserable day so I didn't see the place at its best, but it wasn't somewhere I'd want to visit again. It just looked a really run down place, about 20 years past its peak. I guess I may have a different view if I visited during tourist season though.
Enough of my Judith Chalmers bit, now to the race. As I said, it was miserable weather, pretty much typical London weather though so it wasn't such a bad thing. Grey skies and drizzle all the way round. Got to say the organization at the start was a bit of a joke, they called all the women forward to start at the front, the women tend to be the slower runners so if you put them at the front it creates carnage behind as everyone tries to make their way past. The first 2km's was just a case of looking for gaps so I could make my way through the field a bit. After that it was plane sailing.
My pace was a bit up and down during the race, first 5km I was going well but I made mistake by not taking water at the 5km station, 3km's down the road I was suffering for it. I got some fluid on board at the 10km station and another kilometre on I was feeling much better so started to pick up the pace a bit. There was a guy from the University who was planning to run about the same time as me, he'd gone past at about 9km, I caught him back up by 14, and went by. I was going well for up to about 18, then started to suffer a bit, hoping for the finish line to come to find me. Despite that I managed to keep my pace fairly steady and I came home in a new official time PB of 1:27:41, seven seconds quicker than in Orihuela. On chipped time I exactly equalled my Orihuela time, 1:27:27.
All in all it was a good day, I'd been feeling stiff the couple of days before so I wasn't sure of what kind of run I could produce, to equal my best was a decent result. My next half isn't until early April, so March is all about getting the long runs in ready for London. After two good races in the space of two weeks I go into the final few weeks of training pretty confident that I can get the result I want.
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