Thoughts before Lübeck Half-Marathon

This Sunday, I’ll run my next race, a half-marathon in Lübeck. It’s part of the 2nd running of the Lübeck Marathon. They’ve got a full marathon, a half-marathon, a 4.2k fun run and 10-person marathon relay. Last year, I was registered for the first running and even picked up my race number, but felt too sick to run on the day of the race. So, a new course for me …

Lübeck Marathon

The race starts in the middle of the old down (basically where the Lübeck City Run ended – the race I ran two weeks ago) and goes out toward the Baltic Sea. The turnaround for the marathon is in the port city of Travemünde, Lübeck’s “sea-side resort”. (Readers of Thomas Mann’s epic novel “Buddenbrocks” will have heard of it.) Of course, the half-marathon turns a bit earlier, after having gone through the “Herrentunnel”, a road tunnel under the river Trave:

Screenshot from Google Earth

Coming out of the tunnel will be the steepest section of the course, and I assume that the rest of the course will be quite flat.

What I’m a bit worried about is the fact that the half-marathon starts 15 minutes after the full marathon, and the full marathon starts with a short loop around the “Holstentor”, a pretty gate in the old town wall dating back to the middle-ages:

Photo by Frank Hamm

So I expect that we will run up to the slower marathoners pretty quick, but hopefully the number of participants will not be that high that there’ll be a lot of congestion.

Goals

After my successful Lübeck City Run I’m quite confident that I can run a decent fast half-marathon. I’ll shoot for a 4:30/k pace which would result in a sub-1:35 half marathon. That’ll be a hard pace and I’ll have to work to hold that pace for the whole race, but it should be possible. My base goal would be to run under 1:37.

All of this is of course based on the time I want to run in Ratzeburg at the end of November. That’ll be a 26k race around the “Großer Ratzeburger See” (Great Ratzeburger Lake), mostly on trails and with some quite steep hills. I’d like to be able to run that race in about 2:00 hours – a 4:37/k pace. (4:37/k pace is a 1:37:24 half-marathon.) As the course in Ratzeburg is probably a bit slower than the road-marathon course in Lübeck, I’d like to have some extra cushion – 1 minute for the hills at the start, and another minute for the hills towards the end. That results pretty nicely in an even 4:30/k pace (that would be 1:57 for 26k, plus two minutes of cushion would give me a 1:59).

So I’m confident that if I can run a sub-1:35 half marathon this weekend, I have a good shot at a sub-2 race in Ratzeburg with another five weeks of training.

Training in the last weeks

The last two weeks I have not managed to get a lot of training in. First, I was quite tired after the Lübeck City Run and took the first few days a bit easy. On Thursday, I did an Interval session (1k @ Marathon, half-marathon and twice at 10k-pace) that I found to be very hard, and I was really tired after that. I had a few days off work after that and did a lot of things with my wife (she had her birthday with the regular family and fried parties, some shopping trips etc.), and I barely squeezed in short runs on these days. Also, I didn’t feel like doing any longer or faster sessions.

On Tuesday, I felt a bit fresher, but I still shortened my initially planned 19k run to 13.5k. But I included a good length of faster tempo, about 5k @marathon pace and another 3k @ half-marathon pace. I wanted to go a bit faster towards the end, but I didn’t have enough juice in me to run a consistent 10k pace.

I wanted to do another faster run today (Thursday), but I had to work late and take care of my sick wife, so I had to move that to tomorrow. 2 days before the race is probably not a good time to do fast intervals, so I’ll probably just run 2k or so at marathon to half-marathon pace in order to be fresh for Sunday’s race.

Hopefully my performance on Sunday will give me confidence for the next training phase …