Medio Maraton de Madrid - Race report

March 29th was the half-marathon in Madrid that I got from Marius for Christmas. It was my fourth half-marathon and I trained a solid 15 weeks to earn a new personal record. Prior to this race, my personal record was 1:47, set in Lisbon in March 2013...I was around 30 seconds shy last year when I ran in Bergen coming in at 1:48 - I forgot the exact seconds.

We had a few days in Madrid before the race, but I will write about those later when I can get the pictures from Marius' camera. The course looped the northern part of the city and finished in a very nice park. There were nearly 17,000 runners, and I definitely blended in with the crowd. Marius was much easier to spot with his blond hair. Even though I wore my American flag shorts, there were so many people that it would have been difficult for Marius to spot me through the crowd. So I encouraged him to do his workout and keep an eye out for me at 10:45am. 

The course was not flat, like I had thought it would be. Rather, it rolled up and down through the city. I had my Garmin clocking my time and I managed to maintain a steady pace that was significantly faster than the pace I ran in Lisbon, Portugal in 2013. The Madrid half was probably the first half marathon where I was actually bored during the run. There was no street-side entertainment like at the other races and fans only lined the remaining three kilometers.

Map and splits 1-13 (note it is minutes per km)

Splits for km 10-21.1

When I saw Marius at the 19th km marker I was worn out. It was the steepest incline of the race and I was really losing my speed having maintained such a good pace for most of the race. He said I still looked happy, but it's easy to see in the pictures from the 20th km that I was really worn out! My Garmin GPS watch beeped at 21.1 km and I stopped it to mark exactly the distance of a half-marathon. The Garmin website acknowledged it and gave me a new personal best of 1:41:48! However, that was not the same as the course. So I tried to maintain a good speed to cross the finish in record time. 

Official time 1:46, chip time 1:42....any of those numbers is a personal best. I am one very happy runner!!


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