Pattaya marathon, race day

I did it, I ran a personal best time today on the Pattaya half marathon this morning and besides beating my previous personal best time on this distance by 8 minutes, I also ran a half marathon for the time under 2 hours! Smiles all around!

Posing before the start

The whole race I ran my own tempo and I was actually really relaxed. Had a nice start and kept a good pace all around the course, made sure I drank and ate enough and am happy all around with my performance. My time chip places me as 315th finisher out of 1085 runners and 44th out of 248 in my age category.

Start of the half marathon, I half walk half run by around 50 seconds into the clip

It was a massive event, when we did a U-turn at the half marathon race, there were still hundreds of runners behind me, an impressive but also very motivating sight! Not to mention that there must've been a couple of hundred runners in front of me! According to my wife, they announced over 3.000 runners in the quarter marathon.

Before the start

It was a really hard course, constantly going up and down, breaking the pace many times. I'm all the more surprised I broke my personal best time on this difficult course. I can only compare it to the Phuket Laguna half marathon which is more or less a flat race, which I ran last month. Part of the mystery however is probably explained in the next picture.

Energy gels, I used the top three today, with double caffeine

This was the first time that used energy gels, they keep you hydrated and give you the necessary carbs, protein etc for a period of around 45 minutes . I took one 15 minutes before race start, one around 10km and one around 15km. I could feel a different running sensation, very clear thoughts in my head and a faster pace compared to my previous two half marathons in Phuket, especially towards the end of the race.

Happy as Larry after the race

After the race I was very happy with my time and I felt good and felt a quick recovery. The only thing that wasn't well organized today was the lack of post signs of how far you were into the race, I saw one 8km sign and the 3km, 2km and 1km to go signs. 
I felt that I could get a good time when out of nowhere all of a sudden the 3km to go sign showed up. Around the 2km sign, smack down in the middle of  walking street, the leader of the marathon passed me by or did he fly by? Looking at the time displayed on the car in front of him, I knew I had a good chance of beating my personal best. Although the last km was really hard, I didn't expect to be this fast!

Running through Walking street when the last leftovers of the night stumbled out of the discos was kind of interesting though!

Some thoughts though, it always beats the hell out of me that during the race, somewhere around the 15km, 16 or 17 km mark, you name it, all of a sudden someone passes by you coming out of the background as if they started just a few km's ago. Beats me all the time, where were they all the time before they passed me?

Anyway, off to breakfast with my hungry wife, lots of thanks to her for the moral support and waiting at the finish line today! Later today we're off back home to Samui again.

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Camille