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Half marathon of Leiden

In December I decided that I wanted to run a marathon, looking for one near the end of 2013 I found the marathon of Amsterdam as my target. However I wanted to experience how it was to run in such a big crowd and in a competition kind of way. For this I signed up in February for the half marathon of Leiden on the 26th of May, I reckoned that I would have enough time to prepare the the 21km and 97meter that would be ahead of me. Having had my fair share of running injuries, all of them by thinking that I could do this easily, I found out soon that taking things slow and building it up was for the better. So even before the half marathon I did the 10km in Rotterdam as a first test run. I was fully up and running by then and had put in some nice 17 and 18km runs...

But then the week before Queensday disaster struck! (a month before the half marathon). I hit my knee while biking on a steel cast pole, might have been a bit of karma biting me because I was cycling through a non-biking area. Back to hitting my knee, I took a hefty hit on the right side of my right knee and I actually decided just to continue biking the 10km to the swimming pool, yes I am a bit easy on shrugging off some pain. And the swimming actually went pretty well, but as soon as I left the swimming pool and started biking back it felt like a balloon was blowing up in my knee, and by the next morning, I could barely walk. So I put my leg up, keeping it cool with ice and some special cream to reduce the swelling and that actually helped immensely the swelling went away with 6 days, though I could go for a stroll, running still proved to hurt very much especially the side of my right knee. This unfortunate accident took away roughly 2.5 weeks of my running schedule and I decided to go for an all in two weeks ago and pull of an 19km run just to see if my knee could handle it, and actually I didn’t experience any problems, just a small itch but nothing else. This decided it for me that I was still in the running for the Leiden half marathon.

Now onto the events of the half-marathon, it was an even greater experience. Where I took off to soon in the 10km I actually reigned myself in and to keep to the pacing of the crowd. However the organization made the full marathon and the half marathon start at the same time at the same position and the first 10km of the course was the same for both distances, this did added some more chaos to the run itself, not really allowing me to run my own pace. Luckily after about 6km there was more distance being created between runner and this gave me a chance to run at my own pace for the remainder of the run. I immediately added more speed to my run, had a great flapjack to start off the run and I did feel the energy it gave me, but was quite relieved to see the water and energy drink posts as well. They also served half bananas at the 15.5km mark, but let me say, never again. I am not going to eat any solid food again while running, man it gave me an upset stomach! Just sticking to fluids from now on.

Running those 21097 meters actually was pretty refreshing allowing me to think about a lot of stuff, like what will my next book be (just one among others).

Now it time *drum roll* please for the time! I was aiming to run below 1hour 40minutes. This would mean an average speed of 13.5km/h.

Participant
Naam
Jasper de Joode
Town                  
Zevenbergen
Start number
6059
Category
21km van Zorg en Zekerheid
GJ
1987
Totals
Place
182
Clean Time
1:32:56
Raw Time
1:35:37
Average pace
 4.24 min/km




Overall I couldn't be more pleased with my time! 1h32min56seconds! The setting of the Leiden marathon was great, a very nice running course. I plan to revisit this marathon next year again!

Now it's time to up the ante and get ready for the full marathon this October. I also got some other running events to look forward to. The Bredase Singelloop in 6th of October, also an half marathon and the Tilburg Ten Miles (Ten English Miles) 1st of September this year.  

Here's the medal I got 





And here I am quite happy with it!













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