Well, the world is screwed, life is on hold, bla-bla-bla… Which also means that running races are cancelled until further notice, but that didn’t stop a few of us determined runners from creating our own race! Claire, James and I were planning on running a half marathon in London in early April. By the time race day came, Claire was in Germany, James in the US and I was back in Hungary – and the race got cancelled anyway. We decided to do a virtual run, all doing a half marathon wherever we are, aiming for the same day, while staying safe and doing social distancing.
Claire took on the role of the main organizer and we invited friends to join, so I think a total of 9 people completed the challenge on very short notice. To stay true to this ethos of social distancing, Claire named it A Very Remote Half. We started organizing about a week ahead of the event and decided that the 10th of April would be our race day. Some of us started at the same time, despite being in different time zones, but others had different commitments (or mad snowy weather in Vermont while I was enjoying the sunshine) and completed their runs in the next day or so.
Planning My Run
After returning from England, I’ve spent my “quarantine” time on the north side of Lake Balaton, out in the middle of nowhere, running around nature and being a redneck in the garden. Great trail runs, good workouts and all that, but I haven’t even worn my road running shoes since coming back to Hungary. Everything here has a bit of elevation and I’ve avoided people, roads and civilization completely for about 3 weeks. However, if I wanted to shoot for a PB (personal best) time, I needed to find a good paved road that is very flat. The Káli-basin was luckily nearby, with deserted backroads and only a few sleepy villages which I had to pass through.
I did a few runs around the place to come up with a good route in the week leading up to the event, racking up probably too many kilometers. I mean, I probably shouldn’t have run 33 km in the 4 days leading up to the race… maybe I should have tapered instead? Oh well, next time! I found a nice loop, about 16km long and I did little extra a back-and-forth on a straight, flat last section to add up to a total of 21.1km. Mostly flat, but there were a couple of climbs and descents in there.
My previous best effort for a half marathon effort was 1 hour 41 minutes, which is a pretty decent time I think, but I ran that about a year ago, eventually got injured and stopped running for a while. Now I had a really solid training period leading up to this one, but I also haven’t run half marathons for speed lately. But with the current training and the testing I’ve done before attempting this, I’ve decided that I’d aim for a 4:30/km pace, which would be good for a roughly 1:35:00 half marathon finishing time – although honestly I wasn’t sure I could keep going that fast.
Race Day
I jogged to the start line, checked in with the others who were starting at the same time and set off at 2 pm. Beautiful warm day, a bit of a headwind and lots of motivation to do well in this challenge. I realized very early on that keeping the 4:30/km pace would be a bit of a challenge as I was watching my heart rate climb to places where it shouldn’t have been climbing to – but at the same time I also wanted to push on and see if I can maintain this speed without collapsing before the finish line.
While the surroundings were really pretty, I just concentrated on putting one foot after the other, maintaining a reasonable speed up climbs, making up time on the descents and being consistent on the flat sections. It was the perfect day for it and I really enjoyed it.
The hard part started around kilometer 18, when fatigue really started to hit me – but I was still easily within my planned time, so after dropping the pace a little, I quickly sped back up. The finish line was close and Aisling was standing by the road to take embarrassing photos of my sweaty exhausted face, so I pushed on and finished the half marathon in just under 1 hour and 33 minutes. To be more precise, 1:32:44, according to my Strava. I felt like I gave it everything I could with my current levels of fitness, and I am very satisfied with my time.
Analyzing the effort was interesting. My average heart rate came out to be 179 BPM, which seems a little bit scary, and a 4:24/km pace is not too shabby. If you want to dive into the stats, here is the effort on Strava.
Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the fastest, as James ran an incredible 1:26:01 half marathon, and Barna, my old high-school classmate came in 3rd with an awesome 1:35:15 time. So, I think that means I owe James a beer? We ended up with people joining from Vermont, New York, the UK, Germany and Hungary. Also, special shoutout to Claire for organizing and for my Mom who joined the challenge – she said that since nobody specified that the half marathon had to be a running event, she just walked it around the neighborhood.