Tag Archives: race-report

Another great half marathon – tho not a personal best

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Today I ran my third Dubai Creek Striders half marathon. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and wonderful event, even though I didn’t quite achieve my goal of bettering my personal best time from last year.

Early on it seemed it wasn’t going to be my day.

I started out a little behind where I wanted to be, so I sped up which is usually not a good idea. It wasn’t helped by my shoe lace coming undone. I felt like a rookie, even more so when, unforgivably, it came undone again at the 13km mark.

After the first glitch I did find a bit of a rhythm. I enjoy this time, trying to find the right pace. It’s when my mind starts getting into an even more ridiculous mood. One thought I remember playing with was it’d be funny if the marathon had evolved from something invented as the “half marathon”. Perhaps someone dared to ask, “Hey, why don’t we take this half marathon concept and double it into a full marathon.” Sometimes it’s worrying how my mind spends its time during a run.

After 4-5kms I hit trouble. This is the first time in a running event that I’ve suffered stomach cramps, and that I’ve had to stop during the race for a toilet break. Possibly related, it was the first time I’ve eaten my neighbour’s oily curry the night before a race.

I crashed and burned, or more correctly, I stopped and pooped at the first public toilet I could find.

The toilet happened to be a “squatty” – hole in the ground, however beggars can’t be choosers, so I did what I had to do.

Overall I finished in 1:37:33. Altho the race officials won’t hear a bar of it, if you remove the 22 minutes* I spent trying to manage the awkwardness of the bathroom, I would have had a podium finish, probably finishing 3rd overall. If you also minus tying laces twice, I may have given Cheetah from the Striders a run for his money for 1st place.

After the pitstop I felt physically fine. However I couldn’t really push up the tempo a whole lot. It may have been due to the missed chance to finish close to my best. Or another thought I had was, perhaps I’m rubbish at pushing myself to run fast when there’s no automated voice from my iPhone and the adidas miCoach app telling me to.

My real running goal is for the full Standard Chartered Dubai marathon on January 25, 2013. I’ve been training very well for it. I feel I’m in better shape now than I’ve ever been. When it came to this half marathon though, I didn’t do as well as I’d like. The old adage, ‘Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance’ may help explain why I didn’t get a finishing time to reflect better fitness than where I was last year.

It was lovely to see the Dubai Creek Striders official pacers doing a wonderful job to finish within their respective times. I loved their easily identifiable Pacers shirt with the time they’d finish, with a big “Inshallah” written beneath.

Any disappointment in my own missed goal time was long gone before the homeward stretch up to the Dubai Creek Yacht and Golf Club. This is where I saw my family, and my boys are now at the age where they run beside me to the finish – and I don’t need to slow down very much.

If crossing the finish line after 21.1km wasn’t satisfaction enough, there was a spectacular buffet breakfast with all the trimmings. Old runners, new runners, fast runners, slow runners, many of us went on to eat like Kings and Queens. A finisher’s breakfast is well-deserved. And as a result, it tastes amazing!

All in all, I had a wonderful day. I love seeing the beauty of a fit city participating as a single community. Runners come from all walks of life, yet for the few hours of this event we all shared something special which we’ll always have. And for the great majority of people, we’ll probably all do it again.

* may be exaggerated.

Marathon PB at Dubai Marathon, 27 January 2012

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Yesterday at the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon I crushed my running goal of 3:30. I crossed the line in a net result of 3:23.32 – which I’m very happy with. The time’s 15 minutes faster than my former best, in 2007; and 35 mins better than my last marathon just over 2 years ago.

I’m not sure why more people don’t run marathons. In the morning for breakfast I ate a whole family block of chocolate, guilt-free. I can justify eating almost anything providing it has high carbs. I guess as my running will now reduce, that diet will be a luxury of the past.

I’ve now run three marathons in three countries. And I’ll deny it if you ever bring it up, but at the starting line of each I’ve shed a tear or two thinking how fortunate I am to be in a position to do this.

My music collection didn’t really help me in such an emotional moment, hearing John Butler singing about having to believe. That was resolved with the next track “Don’t worry be happy” by Bobby McFerrin.

Sadly my iPhone lost its GPS signal for a moment, so my GPS girlfriend was overwhelmingly pleased thinking I was on world record pace. Once the distance is miscalculated there’s no recovery, she’ll tell wrong information every kilometer. This was a bit of a pain, as my phone had become my training partner for the past three months. It was now just a very distracting iPod. The music was at least helpful. Gloria Gaynor singing “I will survive” was timely and encouraging.

On the timing part, I did have the backup of my stop watch, so I could keep an eye on the times of my kilometer splits.

Marathoners generally have an A and B goal, so if things don’t go to plan, there’s still something to aim for. This year a guy ran wearing a 10kg rhinoceros suit to raise awareness for Save The Rhino. So most people also had a C goal in this run to not be beaten by a rhino. I saw him getting assembled at the start line, then thankfully not again for the rest of the day.

The run was fantastic. I ran the majority of training runs required in the three months before the race, so all the hard work was done. In the race I could just relax and enjoy – which I did. Although there weren’t large crowds of spectators throughout, there were still enough people screaming encouragement. Including my family who had come out bearing animal masks, vuvuzellas, and a “Go Daddy Go” sign. Being a Dubai Creek Strider also helped immensely, as wearing the team “vest” got plenty of vocal support from the extended Striders community.

The night before I asked my two sons if they could write some encouragement on my arms, which I could look down and see if I got tired. Myles wrote “Go Ryan” with a smiley, Lewis scribbled all over the other arm, which allegedly said “Go Ryan” also.

It was probably not the most well-executed plan. When I woke up race day at 4am stumbling into the bathroom I laughed out loud when my eyes focused. My face had in permanent pen a mirror image of Go Ryan, where my face must have rested on my arm.
It did come off.

It was tough to stick with the plan of breaking marathon into three parts, running slow, not so slow, then fast. The first 7kms was relatively slow, but then I’d say the rest was a fast medium pace, until the last 4kms when I had to fight to not be too slow. The training prepared me well, but there’s no getting around the fact that 42.2kms is a freaking long way to make the body run. The crowd were cheering the loudest towards the end, which was appreciated. With 3kms to go I caught up with a guy from the club who was struggling more than me. He came back with a bit of a sprint which helped me find an auto drive setting, which pushed me to the finish. On the line I couldn’t help but just stand in a triumphant, relieved, fatigued, blissful, agony. (I hardly even heard my club mate call me a bastard)

My family joined me. Then I hobbled to the Dubai Mall carpark. It seemed like a second marathon – along the way giving an understanding nod to other runners hobbling also.

My mind was a bit of a blur also. As I was walking, I heard a voice behind me say Ryan a few times. All I could register though was, I know that name. It was a colleague who ran the marathon also. I cursed the fact he was walking so comfortably, perhaps the benefits of more experience – this was his fifth marathon in recent years.

Once home I cracked open a beer, had a lovely hot shower to wash off the litre of dried sweat, then had a very relaxing bath. My bath may have been 15 minutes, or 5 hours – I have no idea.

That night we had a bunch of friends over for a belated Aussie Day BBQ. I proudly wore my finisher’s medal, which got some mocking. The kids though were very impressed. They spotted on the medal the number 2 of the year, 2012 and assumed I finished in second place. I went with it. So Ayele Abshero Biza won the marathon in a course record of 2:04.23, then I came in next, 80 minutes later. 🙂

One of the 10 year old girls put it nicely, and said it looked like I just got out of bed. Quite different to all the women who just told me I looked like [expletive].

Realistically, I have no future running goals at this stage. I guess somewhere there is a desire to run the next marathon, and I wonder if I can achieve the next PB, sub 3:20. Pain in my legs and one foot is doing a fine job to mask such desires for the moment.

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and well wishes. To state something beyond obvious, I couldn’t have run the marathon without the support of many people.

Germany and the Berlin marathon – Sept 2009

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Late last month Elle and I took advantage of my parents coming to Dubai and jetted off to Germany for a long weekend on our own. Despite appearences, it wasn’t just for a dirty weekend, there was actually some purpose to the trip. I’ve set a goal to complete the “Big 5” marathons of the world, and decided that Berlin would be a good place to start.

The trip started off on a sour note, when we got bumped from our scheduled flight due to the extremely busy Eid long weekend rus of passengers.  For the uninitiated (like we were), the break of Ramadan means public holidays so a lot of people make the most of it and travel.

We managed to get on a flight later in the day, but had to change our plans as we missed our connecting flight from Munich to Berlin. We ended up arriving in Munich at around 9:00pm and then had to find a hotel for the night. We got completely confused by the train ticketing machine completely in German, so we decided our best bet would be to get a taxi to Munich to find a hotel. we probably should have done more research, as we discovered once we were in the taxi and on the road, that Munich city is actually quite a distance from the aiport and hotels are scattered all over the place.

The taxi driver tried to discourage us from trying the nearby hotels saying they would be fully booked due to the Oktoberfest.  His suggestion was that he drive us 55 Euros away, and then take us back to the airport in the morning – after another 55 Euros later.  But we insisted he stop at the Sheraton so I could see if they had room.  The lady at reception looked at me strangely and said, of course we have vacancies.

Something else surprised me at reception.  In Dubai pornography – anything close to it – is strictly illegal so you just don’t see it at all.  However, when I was standing at the hotel’s front desk, staring right at me was the cover model for Playboy completely topless!  I don’t think I’ve been overly interested in such images since I was 17, but having this strange sight was extremely distracting.  Quite a Europe welcome.  A similar thing greeted us in the rooms, where the TV had 1 movie channel and 4 adult channels.

The next morning we caught a flight to Berlin and managed to hit some random buttons on the ticket machine which spat out a ticket enabling us to catch a bus into the city. After asking a friendly policeman for directions, we eventually located our hotel.  We stayed in the Mercure de Charite.  With the terrible currency conversion between the UAE Dirham and the Euro it was disappointing to find that Charite didn’t mean we were staying in a shelter for the poor and destitute.  Actually we found the hotel through the marathon’s web site according to the distance to the start line – which was just perfect.

I had a few worries going into the marathon.  Most of my training has been through the summer period with frequent and mandatory water stops, so I wasn’t sure I had done sufficient distance training.  My concerns became reality at around the 25km mark when my legs started cramping terribly.  I was on track for a reasonable time until this point.  But with all the stops I saw all my goal times pass me by.  In the end I realised 4hrs was at risk so I really had to knuckle down.  Towards the end I felt terrible agony.  Everything was telling me to stop, except for the million+ spectators. In short it was an amazing experience.

Folllowing the race I was hobbling quite a bit.  I met up with Elle on the steps of the Reichstag where I had to sit for some time.   The Corona helped a little.  The walk from the finish line back to the hotel probably took 10 times longer than it did that morning. I slept extremely well that night.

We missed a day in  Berlin before the race due to the missed flight, so we decided to change our plans a little and try to see a few of the sights the next day then hit Munich and the Oktoberfest later in the day and night.  We did the Reichstag Dome tour, a look around Brandenburg.  Then we left the big smoke for the largest palace in Berlin at Charlottenburg. The whole area was beautiful, and something definitely worth seeing.

We caught the underground back to the airport and made our way to Munich.  By this stage we were seasoned veterans at buying tickets in Germany, but we didn’t need to.  A very friendly German guy gave us a tip that the tickets were priced so they were cheaper as a group of 3 or more – which he had the ticket for already. We got out of it for free, although we gave him 10 Euros anyway.  He was a lovely guy and kept us entertained the whole way.  We knew we were onto a good thing when he mentioned he works at the airport in IT and “it’s shit”.

Unfortunately my limping got worse, so we found our hotel and crashed.  Any thoughts of hitting Oktoberfest that evening were dashed by the allure of a nice warm bath.

We had plenty of time at the airport so I trialled all the local beers on display to try and compensate for missing Oktoberfest the night before.

The w’end flew by, and we arrived safe and sound in Dubai late on Tuesday night.

My worst half marathon yet

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Last year I ran the Gold Coast full Marathon.  It didn’t go great, but I did OK.

Unfortunately my training this year has been abridged due to more than a few injuries. That’s why I decided to focus on just the half marathon this year.  I say “just” because 21.1km still seems like a decent distance unless you’re in a taxi stuck in traffic.

But the half marathon was definitely my worst yet.  I painfully came home in a disappining – even embarassing – time of 1:53:23.  >20 minutes beyond my best.  13 minutes beyond anything I’d consider average for myself.  3 minutes beyond some of the 50 year old ladies in my running club.

Not happy Jan.

I should say though, the event was great, and the buzz of the Gold Coast is always worth it.

The first three kms I ran with a couple of guys from my club.  We were stuck in a fair bit of traffic so we were reduced to 5min+ km, then we started to find some space and got to just over 4:30min/km pace which was closer to our target.

But I fell off this bus at the four km mark as my legs felt like there were filled to the brim with concrete. My legs just didn’t want to move. Each movement was quite painful, particularly anything quicker than a jog, so I deduced from this I should slow things down if I’m going to go any further. 

It’s a depressing feeling when you’re in a world of hurt, and there’s still more than 17 km to go.  Thoughts of stopping there flashed into my mind, but I couldn’t live with a DNF (Did Not Finish) next to my name.  And I thought considering the cost of this exercise, and the trouble I went through to get to GC it would be even more disappointing.  So I continued in a modified running style – one that was less painful.

At around the seven km mark I lost sensation in my left foot.  This is a condition I’ve had on and off for way too long now.  It happened to me at the Brisbane Marathon Festival half marathon also – my last disappointing race.  There I decided to sit down and stretch it out, then I was able to run for a while and the numbness subsided.  So I figured I could just run through this again, and all would be OK.  Four km later, my foot is still annoyingly numb.  But the numbness is starting to be exchanged with a stabbing pain.  Again I considered if I should stop or not – it was really starting to suck.

I continue on, but it’s very noticeable that I’m getting passed by 100s of people, and I’m not passing anyone.

The final half a dozen kilometres were worse still. My speed was reduced to 6mins/km, otherwise my legs felt like they would seize up.  And new feelings of being sick come on the scene to add to the experience.

With a kilometre to go, and then 100m to go I assumed I was going to finish, but I was not overly confident about anything.

I have the ability during any run to break into an impressive sprint when I know I’ll finish soon.  I think I could have sped up a little at this tragic event also, but there was little point and hypocritical to finish fast.  Instead I just maintain my dilapidated canter and stop dead over the finish line.  One of the first-aid ladies take a look at me and ask if  I’m alright. Not a good sign.

Very disappoining end to a disappointing run.  But I guess there are two positives to take from the event. One is I finished despite the adversity, and two is at least I beat the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh.

ADDENDUM:
I was still not well more than a week after the run.  In fact I was worse.  I chose to go against my usual tendencies, and this time actually visit a doctor.  He diagnosed my issue as an infected windpipe.  He was suitably unimpressed that I had attempted a half marathon in that condition.

Antio-biotics and an asthma puffer have eased things.