Spijkenisse Spark Marathon! New PR

Today was my big day! The Spijkenisse Spark marathon! I had two goals:

Beat my PR (3:20:16)
Run a sub 3 hour marathon

In the end, the distance proved to be humbling again! I had to make adjustments on my sub 3 goal but I did beat my old PR by a few minutes and more importantly, I had lots of fun!

My day:

Waking up at 4:00. Aderaline pumping caused me to be a little restless. While I forced myself to stay in bed until 4:50, I didn’t caught any more sleep. This is something I am familiar with so not such a big deal. I just went downstairs and took my headphone and layed on the sofa with some NSDR music (alpha waves).

At 06;30 I had a big bowl with oatmeal, banana and honey as my pre race meal. Took a shower and back to the No sleep deep rest music before driving to my inlaws as they live next to the start.

There I could relax for a bit before doing a 1.8 km warmup to the track fields (which turned out to be a big mistake!) nevertheless my 74 year old father in law took his bike and accompanied me to the start (which was awesome by itself!)

The race:

(I am right behind number 1)

I started in the second row of the race. I checked the results of last year and the fact that the first pacer was targeting 3:15. Unlike last year, there were way more runners that were targetting 2:30 - 2:40 so I was quickly passed by quite a group of runners. It didn’t distract me that much, I focussed on running 4:10 - 4:20 at the start. Which I would normally do in heartrate zone 3. Today the first 7 km had really strong head wind, I did try to be a little more flexible with my pacing range - but it turned out I still underestimated the wind. I quickly realized I was running in zone 5 due to the wind. This early would mean it would come back to hunt me later.

I decided to go for plan b and focus on finishing the run to beat my PR. This turned out to be a good call, the remainder of my run I was in zone 4 - which is much more managable.

I had a new target - sub 3:15, which seemed pretty doable until at 27km forced me to bite through the pain of a large blister. While I can take some pain and keep smiling, it cost me quite some energy. I started to slow down quite a bit and ended up just in time to beat my PR nevertheless!

Cooling down:
My big mistake - I decided to do a warmup from my inlaws to the track field rather than parking there. This meant I also had to go back there. My clothes were still at my inlaws and it was very cold with hard wind. The trafficlights made this 1.8km last more than 30 min. This caused me to suffer from quite some hypothermia symptoms. Infact that walk back was so much harder than the whole marathon. I nearly collaped after reaching the elevator but made it back! Here my family took care of me and 3h later I was able to drive back home!

Highlights: