Duchy '20'

[Andy in the Duchy Marathon in 2005]

.

Andrew Johnson's time of 2:34:37 in Sunday's Duchy 20 was a new PB! Ok, so it's his first 20 mile race and it's probably slower than his 20 mile split when he ran the Duchy Marathon in 2005, but it's stilll a PB... isn't it?

Here is Andy's account of the race...

T'was cold and windy and occasionally sunny. The aim was to run around 8 minutes/mile and hope to finish in around 2:45, recognising that the hills would slow me down. I couldn't run that slowly, however, and ran the first 8 miles in an average of 7:38. This was partly because (I later discovered) we had the wind at our backs and partly because I stuck with a group of runners to avoid running on my own.

At 8 miles, we turned off the coast run and smack into a very strong wind. We kept running into the wind - and up all the hills on the course - between 8M and nearly 13M. My average pace between 8M and 12M was 8:12 minutes/mile.

I realised that 17M to the finish was going to be into the wind again, so I decided to push the pace on the sheltered (and flat) part of the second lap, between 13M and 17M, which I did (average pace was 7:28 min/mile). 17M to 19M was really hard work (8:04 and 8:08), but the final mile is mostly downhill.

I was 44th, about 15th in my age category (MV45).

Split times, for 5M, 10M, 15M and 20M - 37:59, 39:19, 38:21 and 38:58. So that's 1:17:18 for the first 19M and 1:17:19 for the second.

(RR & AJ)