Four months ago I decided that I would give running a half-marathon a try for the first time in my life.
Preparations
Firstly, I spent a few weeks training, which involved workouts at the gym and running on a treadmill. When the spring came I could go outside and enjoy running closer to the nature. It was exactly three months before the target performance. Each week I was doing 3-4 workouts to boost my condition, which included one slower long run and one basketball 1.5 hour training game. One month before my first official half-marathon appearance I was able to run 18 km at a sustained pace. That gave me confidence that I could complete the target distance of 21.095 km.
Test day
The weather wasn’t good on Saturday, June 20th. It was a cloudy, windy and rainy day. Fortunately, the weather improved before the start of the 3rd PKO Night Wroclaw Half Marathon planned at 9pm. At the starting line I was accompanied by my father, who is an experienced runner (he finished over 10 full marathons). He volunteered to be by my pacemaker. We started to run about 15 minutes after the group of 100 pro-runners because of the race regulations. We were running with big crowd for the first 5-6 km and I was slowing us down, because I wanted to make sure I will finish the race. When I got all my muscles fully warmed up we started to speed up and continued at this pace for the rest of the way. After the 17th km of the race my father left me behind and I finished almost 1 minute after him. I found my final time of 2:04:10 was a very good result. I was very happy that I could run with an average speed over 10 km/h all that distance!
Official result
