inuyama half-marathon

i ran the inuyama half-marathon today and knocked over four minutes off my personal best with a time of 1hour 16minutes and 42seconds. not sure about the position yet, but definitely in the top 30 and there were over 4000 runners competing, so i am very happy right now!

rie and i went up to inuyama on saturday morning and stayed at an onsen hotel. little did we know that lots of other runners were staying there, including the special guest runners. the special female guest runner was a british woman (who works at the embassy over here and is married to a japanese guy) called mara yamauchi. for those who don't know she is currently ranked 6th in the world for women's marathon runners so she is pretty fast! anyway, at dinner we saw her and i went to say hello. she was so friendly and happy to chat to a random person like me. it always makes me happy when a fellow brit is kind and friendly as opposed to drunk and falling over outside a bar!

after a nice onsen and a great sleep i felt good this morning. i managed to get near the front for the start to avoid being stuck behind 4000 other people and felt really good for the first few km. after about 7km i felt like i could even go a bit quicker so upped the pace a little. went through 10km in about 36mins 41seconds. i then started to realise that i felt so much better than the nagoya half-marathon (when i ran with an injury) and so pushed on a little. i ran my 2nd 10km in about 36mins 04seconds, and overtook lots of runners so that made me feel even better. i even overtook mara (who was doing this as a guest runner, so not running full pace!). with about 500m to go i heard someone coming up behind me and breathing way too easily. sure enough, it was mara. she encouraged me to push it for the end, which was really nice, and i sprinted home, running my final 1000m faster than any other 1000m i did in the race.

at the end i shook hands with mara and said thanks. she even kindly posed for a photo with me in front of rie. rie cheered me all the way and was ready for me at the end with warm clothes, sports drinks and lots of words of encouragement and congratulations. it was a perfect run!

so very happy (and quite sore) as i write this now. inuyama was beautiful and a great place to run. the crowd were great as usual. i met a famous marathon runner and even beat her in a sprint finish (her personal best is 8minutes faster than mine though!!!).